NOSTALGIA IN ANIME: REDEFINING JAPANESE CULTURAL IDENTITY ...

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NOSTALGIA IN ANIME: REDEFINING JAPANESE CULTURAL IDENTITY IN GLOBAL MEDIA TEXTS A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in Communication, Culture and Technology By Susan S. Noh, B.A. Washington, DC April 24, 2017

Transcript of NOSTALGIA IN ANIME: REDEFINING JAPANESE CULTURAL IDENTITY ...

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NOSTALGIA IN ANIME: REDEFINING JAPANESE CULTURAL IDENTITY IN GLOBAL MEDIA TEXTS

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Masters of Arts in Communication, Culture and Technology

By

Susan S. Noh, B.A.

Washington, DC April 24, 2017

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Copyright 2017 by Susan S. Noh

All Rights Reserved

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NOSTALGIA IN ANIME: REDEFINING JAPANESE CULTURAL IDENTITY IN GLOBAL MEDIA TEXT

Susan S. Noh, B.A.

Thesis Advisor: Michael S. Macovski, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

Anime has become a ubiquitous facet of the transnational global media flow, and

continues to serve as a unique and acknowledged example of a non-Western media form

that has successfully penetrated the global market. Because of its remarkable popularity

abroad and a trend towards invasive localization techniques, there have been observations

made by Japanese culture scholars, such as Koichi Iwabuchi, who claim that anime is a

stateless medium that is unsuitable for representing any true or authentic depiction of

Japanese culture and identity.

In this paper, I will be exploring this notion of statelessness within the anime

medium and reveal how unique sociocultural tensions are reflected centrally within

anime narratives or at the contextual peripheries, in which the narrative acts as an indirect

response to larger societal concerns. In particular, I apply the notions of reflective and

restorative nostalgia, as outlined by Svetlana Boym to reveal how modern Japanese

identity is recreated and redefined through anime. In this sense, while anime may appeal

to a larger global public, it is far from being a culturally stateless medium. In Chapter

One, I look into the history of anime, focusing on Tetsuwan Atom and Sazae-san as

foundational pieces of modern postwar anime that have shaped two genres distinctive to

Japanese animation: mecha and iyashikei. In Chapter Two, I analyze the ways in which

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director Shinkai Makoto approaches the mediation of tradition and modernity to sustain a

unique sense of Japanese cultural identity within the globally popular anime film, Kimi

no na wa.

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To my family, friends, and mentors who have helped guide me through this extensive process: thank you! Without your advice, love, and tireless support, this project would

not have been possible.

Many thanks, Susan Noh

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2: CONTEXTUALITIES, NOSTALGIA, AND THE ANIME MEDIUM .....4 2.1 Sazae-San, Nostalgia and the Foundations of the Iyashikei Genre ..........................17

2.2 Miyazaki Hayao, Localization, and the Pseudo-Western .........................................29

2.3 A Caveat: Nostalgia and Capitalistic Modes of Strategic Self-Orientalizing ...........32

CHAPTER 3: TRANSFORMATIVE TRADITIONS IN SHINKAI MAKOTO’S KIMI NO NA WA .......................................................................................................................37 3.1 Consumption and Self-Orientalization .....................................................................41 3.2 Fictional Landscapes, Journeys, and the Significance of Doing ..............................51 3.3 Necessary Modernity and Fluid Semiotics ...............................................................58 3.4 Iyashikei, Distance, Melancholy, and Magic Realism ..............................................64

CHAPTER IV: CONCLUSION .......................................................................................69 4.1 Revisiting the Global: Anime and its International Popularity .................................70 4.2 “Odorful” Mediums ..................................................................................................72 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..............................................................................................................74

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Tezuka Osamu’s Tetsuwan Atomu ................................................................10

Figure 2: A screenshot of Atom and Uran. Atomu reveals an iteration of his internal kokoro. ...........................................................................................................16 Figure 3: An example of a Sazae-san comic strip, created by Hasegawa Machiko .......18

Figure 4: The promotional poster for Kimi no na wa ....................................................38 Figure 5: Screenshots of Mitsuha’s miko garb and making kuchikamizake ..................42 Figure 6: Screenshots of Mitsuha’s miko garb and making kuchikamizake ..................42 Figure 7: Screenshot of Mitsuha and Taki trying to find one another, connected by Mitsuha’s cord .................................................................................................47 Figure 8: A screenshot of the location of the Miyamizu spiritual altar and an example of Shinkai’s work with scenery. ...........................................................................56

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CHAPTER  ONE:  INTRODUCTION    

Japanese animation, or anime, has become a ubiquitous facet of the transnational

global media flow, and continues to serve as a unique and acknowledged example of a

non-Western media form that has successfully penetrated the global market. Regardless

of its cultural particularity, it has been subsumed into large pockets of international, non-

Japanese cultures through subcultural fandoms. The earliest iterations of anime aimed at

international audiences, such as Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy), tried purposely to erase

particular symbols that were known to represent Japanese culture — and this objective of

having anime transfer neatly from culture to culture was further exercised by nation-

specific localization teams. Because of anime’s remarkable popularity abroad, and this

movement toward invasive localization techniques, Japanese culture scholars have

suggested that anime is a stateless medium that is unsuitable for representing any true or

authentic notions of Japanese culture and identity.  

Japanese culture scholar Koichi Iwabuchi is perhaps most well known for making

the observation that aspects of Japanese popular culture, particular anime and video

games, can remain “odorless “ across national and cultural boundaries (Iwabuchi 28).

Narratives are scrubbed of cultural particularities and characters are purposely made to

look non-Japanese. What remains is an at best sterilized amalgamation of bits and pieces

of Japanese culture, the remix of which exudes a pleasing cultural “fragrance,” but does

not have any of the heft of an authentic representation of a national culture. In essence,

Iwabuchi makes the point that anime reveals only a pleasing stereotype of Japanese

culture, one that fits comfortably into the pre-existing paradigm of the East as “other.”

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Certainly anime and video games from Japan can be foreign enough for international

consumers, but not so foreign that they would find it unappealing.  

In this thesis, I ask whether Iwabuchi’s observations are valid, focusing in

particular on how anime may or may not represent the contours of Japanese cultural

identity. In the first chapter, I look into the history of anime, focusing on Tetsuwan Atomu

and Sazae-san as two foundational pieces of modern postwar anime that have shaped two

genres distinctive to Japanese animation: mecha and iyashikei. Tetsuwan Atomu is

perhaps the first real foray into global waters for anime, and has largely shaped the

international understanding of anime culture to this day. Comparatively, Sazae-san is

much more internally facing, and was never made for international consumption. The

distinctive ways in which both these anime deal with the overwhelming trauma of war

reveals how culture continues to be reflected within anime narratives. In the case of

Sazae-san, I will apply the concepts of reflective and restorative nostalgia, as defined by

Svetlana Boyd, as a means of recreating Japanese identity through anime. The ability to

display both reflective and restorative nostalgia effectively, within a single genre, makes

iyashikei a powerful form in which to explore identity formation as an unstable balance

between simultaneous loss and restoration (Boym 49).

In light of these observations, I ask if the tension around cultural identity remains

a relevant issue for the Japanese in the present. In order to do this, I analyze the hugely

popular anime film, Kimi no na wa (Your Name), directed by Shinkai Makoto in 2016,

and explore the overarching themes of fluidity of meaning in regards to traditional

practices, the materiality of historical identity, and nostalgia-driven modes of identity

creation. The film’s study of the mediation between tradition and modernity reveals that

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the crisis of cultural identity remains a relevant and robust issue for the Japanese public,

and that anime remains a particularly poignant medium in which to explore narratives of

self-identity, precisely because of its hybrid cultural beginnings as a Western ‘modern’

art form that was adapted by Japanese artists to suit their native public’s tastes.  

While it may be tempting to label anime as stylistically non-Japanese because of the

stereotypical depiction of doe-eyed humanoid figures with non-natural colored hair and

impossible proportions, I suggest that it is impossible for any expressive artistic medium

not to be affected by the sociocultural context in which the author is steeped. The

zeitgeist of a particular period, will inevitably appear at the peripheries of the narrative,

whether it is as explicit as the themes that are explored, as a response to a particular

societal need, or as cultural concepts such as iyashikei that are expressed subtly. To state

that anime is capable of displaying an only sterile iteration Japanese culture is to ignore

the nuanced variances within anime’s many genres and the wide breadth of topics that are

covered.  

In this thesis, I will look to the early anime works of Tetsuwan Atomu and Sazae-

san, and the ways in which they explore the period following World War II. Both series

are responses to wartime trauma, but approach the topic through very different narrative

methodologies. I will then bring similar observations to bear on how the iyashikei genre

continues to respond to sociocultural tensions and identity-related conflict in the more

recent work of Shinkai Makoto’s Kimi no na wa and analyze the ways in which Shinkai

explores and represents the conflicts of the present in his critically acclaimed film.  

       

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CHAPTER  TWO:  CONTEXTUALITIES,  NOSTALGIA,  AND  THE  ANIME  MEDIUM  

In  Recentering  Globalization:  Popular  Culture  and  Japanese  Transnationalism,  

Koichi  Iwabuchi  states  that  Japanese  popular  culture,  particularly  media  forms  such  

as  anime  and  video  games,  can  be  subsumed  into  the  “global  media  flow”  (Castells  

2011)  due  to  its  mukokuseki  properties.  Mukokuseki  can  loosely  be  defined  as  

“something  or  someone  lacking  any  nationality”  (Iwabuchi  28),  and  in  essence,  

refers  to  both  the  deliberate  and  unintentional  elimination  of  cultural  

particularities.  This  process  is  done  at  the  national  level,  where  corporations  

purposely  expunge  expressions  of  Japanese  culture  and  characteristics  in  order  to  

appeal  to  a  wider  global  audience,  and  also  at  a  local  level,  where  anime  consumers  

from  different  nations  exercise  various  “glocalization”1  techniques  to  make  foreign  

texts  palatable  for  their  native  audiences.  In  attempting  to  appeal  to  a  universal  

audience,  cultural  exports  rely  on  a  “disappearance  of  any  perceptible  

‘Japaneseness’”  (Iwabuchi  33).  From  this  perspective,  it  is  not  so  much  that  anime  

serves  as  a  prime  example  of  a  non-­‐Western  media  text  which  has  the  potential  to  

defy  the  overwhelming  influence  of  Americanization,  but  that  in  aiming  for  global  

popularity,  anime  has  had  to  accommodate  for  the  influence  of  westernization,  

which  has  become  a  kind  of  global  cultural  norm.  In  this  sense,  while  anime  may  

have  strains  of  specific  cultural  characteristics  that  may  represent  “Japanese”  

culture,  it  is  cleansed  of  any  potential  off-­‐putting  “odors”  (Iwabuchi  28).  Odors  are                                                                                                                  1  Glocalization  is    a  term  that  was  first  coined  in  the  late  1980’s  (in  a  publication  of  the  Harvard  Business  Review)  and  is  rooted  in  the  Japanese  term  dochakuka,  which  originally  was  understood  in  the  context  of  “adapting  farming  technique  to  one’s  own  local  conditions”  (Sharma  1).  The  term  has  since  been  adapted  to  mean  the  somewhat  paradoxical  “universalization  of  particularization  and  the  particularization  of    universalism”  (Robertson  100).    

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the  parts  of  a  culture  that  outsiders  would  deem  too  foreign  to  seem  generically  

appealing  or  do  not  fit  conveniently  into  the  preconceived  framework  of  one’s  

exoticization  of  another  culture.  Yet  in  depriving  a  cultural  artifact  of  its  cultural  

odors,  what  creators  have  expressed  through  anime  can  amount  to  nothing  more  

than  an  irreversibly  altered  and  sterilized  echo  of  Japanese  culture.  According  to  

Iwabuchi,  the  global  desire  to  engage  with  popular  culture,  particularly  the  virtual  

elements  such  as  Japanese  anime  and  video  games,  is  not  a  manifestation  of  a  

yearning  to  connect  with  Japanese  culture,  but  a  mere  desire  to  consume  “Japan”  as  

a  “materialistic  consumer  commodity”  (Iwabuchi  34).  

  Japanese  culture  scholar,  Azuma  Hiroki,  presents  similar  ideas  in  his  research  

on  native  otaku2  engagement  with  anime,  as  he  outlines  the  complex  and  

transformative  dynamics  that  anime  was  shaped  by,  in  order  to  be  considered  

Japanese.  He  argues  that  the  Japan  that  is  portrayed  in  anime  is,  at  best,  a  pseudo-­‐

Japan  (Azuma  20).  This  desire  to  consume  an  illusion  of  a  national  culture  is  merely  

an  extension  of  a  consumerist  subculture  that  currently  represents  a  larger  trend  

towards  global  postmodernity.  Postmodernism  privileges  simulacra  as  equivalent  to  

the  authentic  and  the  real,  making  anime  an  ideal  medium  in  which  to  create  

illusory  images  of  a  pseudo-­‐national  culture.    Anime,  and  the  fan  base  that  supports  

and  spurs  its  development,  is  powered  exclusively  through  simulacra,  whether  in  

the  form  of  fan-­‐derivative  works  -­‐-­‐  e.g.  doujinshi  (fan  comics),  fanart,  fanfiction,  and  

so  on-­‐-­‐  the  desire  for  non-­‐canonical,  alternative  storylines;  or  consumerist                                                                                                                  2  In  the  West,  otaku  is  a  generally  pejorative  term  for  a  die-­‐hard  anime  or  manga  fan.  In  East  Asia,  it  remains  a  pejorative  term,  but  can  be  extended  to  mean  an  obsession  of  any  kind.  For  example,  an  individual  who  is  obsessed  with  trains  would  be  considered  a  train  otaku.      

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interactions  with  paraphernalia  that  are  only  distantly  related  to  the  essence  of  the  

anime  narrative  (Azuma  30).  These  can  include  such  acts  as  purchasing  household  

goods  or  figures  based  on  anime  franchises,  as  a  means  of  trying  to  get  more  closely  

connected  to  the  core  of  an  anime  narrative,  despite  the  fact  that  these  acts  of  

consumerism  do  nothing  to  enhance  the  viewer’s  relationship  with  the  essence  or  

ideology  of  the  work.  In  short,  both  scholars  have  noted  anime’s  inability  to  portray  

a  genuine  depiction  of  the  cultural  essence  of  Japan,  and  in  its  place  is  a  sterilized  

copy,  devoid  of  any  sense  of  “grand  narrative”  which  gestures  towards  a  kind  of  

unified  ideological  paradigm  or  cultural  influence  (Azuma  36).  Instead,  anime  

narratives  are  sustained  through  the  capitalistic  accumulation  of  paraphernalia:  a  

web  of  physical  and  nonphysical  objects  connected  by  images  of  attractive,  

nationally  non-­‐descript  characters  emblazoned  upon  them,  and  simulacra:  

derivative  works  which  are  often  divorced  from  the  canonical  narrative  (Azuma  37).  

This  web  exists  only  to  feed  a  fan’s  desire  for  more  content,  often  at  the  expense  of  

quality.  In  this  situation,  fans  may  engage  only  with,  at  best,  the  flimsy  depiction  of  

the  pseudo-­‐Japan  in  anime.  Anime  can  sustain  its  global  popularity  only  by  

constantly  re-­‐orientalizing3  itself  to  attract  the  Western  gaze,  and  by  simultaneously  

easing  the  tension  between  being  foreign  and  “other,”  through  various  localization  

techniques  and  making  the  foreign  feel  at  least  somewhat  familiar.    

  Anime’s  hybrid  Western/Japanese  cultural  beginnings  reflect  the  fact  that  the  

art  was  initially  sustained  by  Western  technology,  physically  embodying  the  tension                                                                                                                  3  Orientalism  is  a  term  coined  by  Edward  W.  Said  in  Orientalism  (1978),  where  he  shows  how  the  study  of  Orientals  through  the  gaze  of  the  West  is  inextricably  tied  to  the  power  structures  borne  from  imperialist  agendas  of  the  past,  which  continue  to  exert  influence  over  how  the  West  perceives  the  East  as  its  diametric  Other.    

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between  familiar  and  the  non-­‐familiar.  This  tension  is  a  primary  feature  that  comes  

up  repetitively  in  the  discourse  of  postwar  Japanese  national  identity  is  the  

assimilation  of  Western  influences  to  a  uniquely  Japanese,  and  to  a  broader  extent,  

Asian  context.  Ideologies,  such  as  wakon-­‐yosai,  translated  as  “Japanese  spirit-­‐

Western  techniques”  (Sato  2007),  continued  to  drive  the  growing  acceptance  of  

Westernization  in  Japan,  while  allowing  its  citizens  to  take  pride  in  some  abstract,  

yet  unchangeable  cultural  essence.  In  some  sense,  these  ideologies  can  be  seen  as  

coping  mechanisms  for  the  overwhelming  influence  of  Western  technologies  and  

ideologies  that  threatened  Japanese  tradition,  and  the  consequent  tensions  in  

national  and  cultural  identity  after  the  crippling  defeat  of  World  War  II.  By  making  

cultural  assimilation  a  fundamental  part  of  the  modern  Japanese  identity,  citizens  

would  be  able  to  maintain  a  sense  of  cultural  superiority,  even  in  the  face  of  great  

historical  loss  and  postcolonial  influence  (Iwabuchi  59).  While  all  nations  assimilate  

Western  influences  in  a  manner  that  suits  their  own  local  contexts,  it  may  be  a  

unique  feature  of  Japanese  culture  to  make  this  process  a  fundamental  part  of  

cultural  and  national  identity.    Whether  this  sense  of  superiority  is  justified  is  

irrelevant  in  the  face  of  national  identity  formation,  as  the  processes  that  define  the  

ethos  of  Japaneseness  constantly  reflect  and  are  influenced  by  the  specificities  of  the  

current  socioeconomic  and  cultural  circumstances.  For  example,  in  the  past,  the  

wakon-­‐yosai  ideology  stemmed  from  the  term  wakon-­‐kansai,  translated  as  “Japanese  

spirit,  Chinese  technology.”  This  term  appears  prior  to  when  the  Japanese  first  

encounter  with  the  West,  and  it  shows  how  they  transform  their  ideology  to  suit  the  

political  and  sociocultural  currents  of  the  time.  Postwar  Japan’s  uniquely  liminal  

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position  as  both  aggressor  and  victim  reflects  tensions  in  how  to  define  one’s  global  

and  local  identity,  and  these  same  struggles  are  reflected  in  the  narratives  of  many  

popular  anime  films  and  franchises.  From  the  beginning,  anime  seemed  to  absorb  

these  struggles  and  represent  them  obliquely,  at  least  in  the  peripheries  of  the  

films/works,  both  in  terms  of  narrative  focus  and  also  through  the  nature  of  anime’s  

advent  into  Japanese  culture  and  the  world.    

These  struggles  come  out  explicitly  in  the  works  of  Tezuka  Osamu  and  

Hasegawa  Machiko,  the  respective  creators  of  Tetsuwan  Atomu  and  Sazae-­‐San  

respectively.  Considered  the  god  and  goddess  of  postwar  Japanese  anime,  these  two  

creators  created  the  foundations  of  what  would  later  become  two  genres  

characteristic  of  Japanese  anime  culture  in  particular,  setting  it  fundamentally  apart  

from  other  animation  cultures.    

Tetsuwan  Atomu  or  Astro  Boy,  as  it  is  known  in  the  West,  is  considered  the  

first  Japanese  animation  series  to  be  exported  globally,  and  it  set  the  precedent  for  

the  mecha  anime  genre,  a  strain  of  science  fiction  that  revolves  around  large  robots  

or  machines  that  influence  a  societal  culture  in  often  traumatic  ways.  Initially,  

Japanese animation started as an experimental hybrid text, explicitly reflecting heavy

American, German, French and Chinese influences throughout the early twentieth

century onward (eg. Disney, Emile Cohl, Kalif Storch, Chinese shadow puppet play,

etc.), and was also heavily influenced by the turbulent political currents of that time

(Onoda-Power 128). For example, after the first wave of animators rose in 1910 with

creators like Shimokawa Oten and Kitayama Seitaro, animation quickly became a tool for

World War II propaganda for the Japanese government. During these early iterations,

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Japanese animation was not “anime” as we consider it today. From the early 1910s up

until the 1960s and 70s, Japanese animation was defined by a native animator’s efforts to

compete with their “slicker American and European counterparts” (Onoda-Power, 129).

Limited economic resources did not allow for luxuries like sound technology and color,

which were included so easily in Western films. Naturally, audiences gravitated towards

works like Disney, which at the time seemed far ahead of the game. America was largely

considered a symbol of richness and newness, and the appeal of the spectacle was

palpable in its market presence. Even Tezuka, who would later be considered the “father

of manga,” was influenced and moved by Disney films like Bambi and Snow White,

relentlessly (Onoda-Power, 131). Yet their limited budget allowed for Tezuka’s

production team to explore innovative new ways to cut costs without compromising

quality. Inasmuch as Western entities constantly influenced these forefathers, it would be

difficult to think of anime as anything other than a hybrid creation. In fact, even

foundational works like Astro Boy used funds given by NBC Enterprises in America to

increase the quality of its animation (Ruh 211). There are, however, dominant Japanese-

centric themes that ultimately allowed Japanese animation to separate from (or at the very

least, to undermine) the hegemonic presence of the West within this medium, and begin

to be reflective of its own cultural nuances.

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Figure 1. Tezuka Osamu’s Tetsuwan Atomu.

The ways in which Osamu cut production costs by changing the animation

stylistically often alluded to traditional Japanese arts, such as kabuki, where actors would

often stop mid-motion to pose, in order to accentuate an important monologue or

emotion” (Onoda-Power 134). Having fewer frames per shot allowed for Osamu to

emphasize what was being said on screen, and lower the cost of production. Furthermore,

the company that he created, Mushi Productions, experimented with narratives that were

targeted at adults, as opposed to children -- a feature of anime that remains a dominant

source of attraction to fans to this day. Though these works could be clearly considered

“adult,” through their exploration of sexuality and bawdy humor, they were also “adult”

in the sense that they appealed to adult viewers through the depiction of comparatively

more complex emotions, dry humor, and topical subjects, such as politics. He called this

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genre “animerama,” combining the thematic elements of animation, drama, and cinema

together, again revealing how monumental Tezuka and his production company was in

the development of anime as its own, culturally unique medium within the general field

of animation (Onoda-Power 137). Animation was no longer merely for children, but for

people of all ages. In this sense, animation could explore and address themes of identity,

trauma, and loss in a sophisticated manner that responded to the needs of a broader part

of the public. This willingness to engage with a broader set of ideas—and to challenge

the medium to create nuanced stories that take advantage of the abstracted human form4

remains one of the most critical differences between Japanese anime and Western

cartoons. In this sense, even the subject matter that Japanese animation is willing to

portray shows a degree of cultural particularity that keeps anime content from being

universally “stateless.”

In a postscript by Tezuka, he states how working on these adult narratives was

“cathartic” (Onoda-Power 143), and it is this process of examination and catharsis that

made both manga and later, anime, during this period a medium deeply reflective of the

traumatic events of the present (eg. the atomic bombing, loss of World War II, Korean

War, and the Vietnam War). Since the world was preoccupied with these mass conflicts

during the mid-twentieth century, this situation may have created a more receptive

environment for manga to hit the international market. In this sense, while anime remains

“hybrid” in that it began as a medium that was inspired by the techniques and materials of

                                                                                                               4  In  his  book,  Understanding  Comics,  Scott  McCloud  elaborates  how  the  simplification  of  the  human  form  allows  the  viewer  to  “focus  on  specific  details.  By  stripping  down  an  image  to  its  essential  ‘meaning,’  an  artist  can  amplify  that  meaning  in  a  way  that  realistic  art  can’t”  (30).  There  is  also  a  simultaneous  “universality  of  cartoon  imagery,”  which  may  lower  the  barrier  towards  empathy  for  the  character  on  screen.    

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the West, it is the contextual particularity in which anime was created that gives it its

“statefulness.” Recognizing the historical and socioeconomic context that compelled

anime creators to use new methods of animation and new approaches to create

sophisticated and nuanced narratives shows that anime was already becoming a unique

branch of animation during this period. International recognition of this trend started with

the advent of Astro Boy on the global stage.

Astro Boy was the first anime that acquired a truly substantial market presence

abroad. This show first aired in the United States in 1963, on the independent news

station, WNEW, on Saturdays at 6:30 p.m., which was originally considered to be an

unusual time for cartoons during this time period (Ruh 218). Like many early anime that

aired in the West, the content was heavily censored and policed in order to follow

American values and broadcast standards. This censorship occurred even within the

context of Osamu admitting that he had attempted to frame Astro Boy to be as culturally

neutral as possible, because of the hope for of international consumption (Schodt 86). In

attempting to appeal to the global audience, Osamu often used Western religious motifs,

and often avoided Eastern Shinto or Buddhist imagery. In this sense, Astro Boy seems to

be a prime example of what Koichi Iwabuchi defines as a mukokuseki approach to anime

media production, purposely gravitating towards universalizing themes and blurring any

sense of cultural specificity (Iwabuchi 72). I will go on to suggest, however, Tezuka

Osamu’s attempts to blur the cultural particularities of Astro Boy largely did not work,

and Astro Boy had to continue to be localized by the Western broadcasting entities

through actions like taking out some of the violence in the film. Even his attempts at

purposely exploring Western religion in his narratives were excised by NBC as

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inappropriate for American children to be exposed to in a cartoon (Schodt 86). This

reveals that even purposeful efforts to make an anime series feel “stateless” were largely

unsuccessful and needed to be reworked by localization teams. This once again supports

the idea that context cannot be divorced from the content. Cultural particularities will be

reflected in the medium, regardless of creator intention.

Another feature that made Astro Boy and subsequent anime narratives difficult to

localize in the West was the amount of violence that children’s anime depicted (Ruh

219). These cultural standards of what animation can or should portray show how anime

had already progressed and developed, at least in some part, as a response to the turbulent

post World War II era and viewers’ processes of making sense of chaotic violence, and

consequent feelings of loss. For example, characters’ deaths, and portrayals of empathetic

humanoid robots being explicitly destroyed, were fairly common throughout the original

narrative; however, in the English equivalent, these deaths were often replaced with

explanations that the character had “fainted” or were taken out altogether (Schodt 85).

While critics such as Tim Hollis label such aesthetics as “mindless mayhem,” animation

was actually a means of depicting these violent traumas, many of which resisted explicit

verbal expression, through layers of abstraction both in the figures of the characters and

in the narratives that were expressed by anime creators during this time (qtd. in Ruh

219). While depicting traumatic violence in figures that are too realistically human would

be damaging to the psychological state of the show’s viewers, the portrayal of an

innocent humanoid robot boy dealing with difficult situations and learning to differentiate

between moral good and evil was an amusing way for children to deal with the

technology-related horrors of World War II. These narratives, with their violence and

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occasionally grotesque abstractions, would resonate with Japanese viewers, who would

have recently suffered the events of World War II, perhaps more so than for American

viewers. This once again shows how the cultural specificity of historical context can be

reflected at the peripheries of an anime narrative and maintain a kind of cultural

“statefulness.”

Far from “mindless mayhem,” the narrative particularities of Tetsuwan Atomu

emerged as a deeply symbolic iteration of Japanese identity during this period. While

Japan was once a victim of horrific technological innovations (e.g. atom bomb), it is also

undeniable that Japan benefited from Western technological developments. Of course,

this includes the technology behind animation. Tezuka Osamu was attuned to this tension

and portrayed a deeply complex narrative that focused on the relationship between

humans and technology, encouraging the potential for a positive use for technological,

and more specifically atomic, energy through the young titular “Astro Boy,” who is

himself a learning, thinking, and feeling robot powered by an atomic core. Given the

recent events of World War II, this image was a controversial and daringly hopeful

depiction of the future. The non-threatening image of a naïve and malleable boy, as

opposed to the more power-focused figure of a full-grown man that is the more common

hero in Western hero franchises (e.g. Superman), is at once a reflection of an uncertain

future and also Japan’s own position as a not-fully-matured nation after the loss of World

War II. Similarly, the impact of military rule during World War II is heavily criticized

within the general narrative of Astro Boy, in that the robotic figures in the narrative serve

as metaphors for humans who were seen as dispensable resources for the war effort.

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Seeing robots, who were capable of complex emotions and thought processes be reduced

to their utilitarian value is an apt metaphor for the Japanese soldiers in World War II.

Since Japan is a culture that highly regards the benefits of a strong work ethic,

revealing the dangers of seeing humans as mere workers or soldiers, instead of holistic

beings with kokoro, lead to negative consequences time and time again. Kokoro is a

complex concept that embodies the holistic “heart, sentiment, will or mind” (Sugiyama-

Lebra 113), and is a word that remains difficult to translate accurately into English.

Beyond the narrative’s close relationship to the historical context that leads to particular

production decisions for Astro Boy, such as the choice of using atomic energy as the

ambivalent power source for his identity, the use of the word “kokoro” is a strong

signifier of Astro Boy’s cultural origins. Kokoro appears in the English dubbed version of

Astro Boy as well, reflecting a strain of Japanese cultural ideology which seeks to

venerate the non-secular self. Kokoro signifies the ability to maintain the inner self and

spirit, even in the context of physical and psychological turmoil, and later, within the

heavily material-driven consumerist society that postwar Japan exemplified. This

complex, and ultimately humanizing, concept could be extended towards even non-

human beings in Astro Boy, encouraging a pacifistic and humanist vision for the

treatment of outside cultures and races. The peace-driven message that Tezuka Osamu

was advocating towards different cultures and even different life forms is conspicuous

throughout all of the episodic narratives of Astro Boy. In regards to the ideological and

linguistic preservation of Japanese cultural doctrines, one can see how the origins of

postwar anime continued to reflect Osamu’s personal ideologies. Anime does not exist in

a cultural vacuum, so it would be difficult to separate the unique Japanese cultural and

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historical contexts from the anime narratives themselves, therefore maintaining a kind of

cultural specificity that defies Iwabuchi’s original claim that anime is “odorless.”

Figure 2. A screenshot of Atomu revealing an iteration of his internal kokoro.

Though early works of anime, like Astro Boy, went through extensive localization

processes in order to assimilate with the least amount of cultural friction, the word kokoro

was kept in the re-mastered English dubbed editions because there was no English word

that could properly define this concept. The preservation of this word and its symbolic

significance shows yet another way in which, regardless of the Western origins of

animation technology, many foundational anime creators continued to use this platform

to explore the nuances of Japanese cultural identity with transnational linguistic play.

They used anime as a platform to react to the sociocultural currents of the time and

encourage the Japanese public to adopt certain ideological premises. For example, Astro

Boy reveals a bold vision in which technology can be used for the betterment of

humanity, despite prior trauma. Embracing this ideology has encouraged Japan to

become a nation of technological and scientific innovation, despite the obvious tensions

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that the nation faces with the societal effects of innovation.5 The relationship between the

word kokoro and the purposefully internationalized appearance of the Astro Boy franchise

reveals of the dynamics of anime as an example of wakon-yosai (Japanese spirit-Western

technology) ideology. As we have seen, kokoro refers to the immutable holistic inner self

and spirit, and keeping that phrase Japanese is significant as both a site of cultural

particularity and also tension between the Western physical dimensions of anime

production and the uniquely Japanese internal ideology. Once again, this gestures

towards the fact that anime may not be “stateless,” but reflective of the context in which

it is created.

2.1 Sazae-San, Nostalgia and the Foundations of the Iyashikei Genre

While Astro Boy was the foundational franchise that paved the way for the future

of global anime consumption and the mecha genre, another franchise played an equally

significant role in developing the distinguishable characteristics of anime as a unique

cultural phenomenon within Japan. The development of the culturally unique genre of

iyashikei shows how anime continues to be reflective of the sociocultural tensions and

currents of Japanese society. It also reveals how certain genres are developed in response

to the needs of the native public, further emphasizing how context deeply affects how

anime narratives are presented.

The yonkoma (4 panel) manga-turned-anime Sazae-San was created by the

forward-thinking Hasegawa Machiko and began to air on October 1969 on Fuji

                                                                                                               5  One  particularly  revealing  example  of  this  tension  is  the  public’s  perception  of  die-­‐hard  anime  fans  or  otaku.  As  stated  before,  in  Japan,  otaku  can  be  extended  to  mean  a  person  who  is  obsessed  with  any  particular  topic  or  paraphernalia.  However,  the  term  is  most  closely  associated  with  anime  fans  or  fans  of  technology.  The  largely  negative  association  with  this  word  shows  how  a  deep  engagement  and  obsession  with  technology  continues  to  be  suspect  even  today.    

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Television, and continues to be broadcast to this day, making it the longest running

animated and non-soap opera scripted television series in history. It broadcasts on Sunday

evenings, at 6:30PM to 7:00PM and consists of three short slice-of-life vignettes

revolving around the titular character Sazae-san and her traditional style three-

generational household. At the end of each episode, the viewers have an opportunity to

interact with the Sazae-san by playing janken or rock-paper-scissors with the character on

screen. The viewership has fluctuated throughout the decades that Sazae-san has been

broadcast, but at its highest, approximately 40 percent of the Japanese population was

watching in 19796.

Figure 3. An example of a Sazae-san comic strip, created by Hasegawa Machiko.

                                                                                                               6  http://www.fujitv.co.jp/en/a_12_05.html  

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While the charms of this anime series are many, one of the primary selling points

of the show for its massive viewership is depiction of a warm and loving, “ideal family.”

Sazae-san as a manga began to be published in Fukunichi Shinbun (Fukunichi

newspaper) in April 1946, immediately after the end of World War II (Booker 241). The

normalcy and warm-hearted nature of the family-oriented narrative likely served as a

healing mechanism for the traumatized Japanese populace, as many families were

separated during this turbulent period, both as a result of the military draft, as well as the

separation of children and parents, when the more vulnerable members of society were

relocated to safer areas in Japan. In this sense, not only would media texts like Sazae-san

act as a tool for healing, they would also provide a charming and lighthearted rulebook

for how to once again bring together a family under the guise of normalcy after the

enormously traumatic events of the war. Throughout Sazae-san, we see the family

interacting with culturally specific seasonal items, activities, and more, often cuing its

viewership what they should be engaging in during the period in which they would watch

the show (Lee 193). For example, around the Christmas holiday period, an episode which

consists of Sazae-san and her younger sister, Wakame, making a Japanese-style

Christmas cake is shown on television. During the summer, a season known for

neighborhood matsuri, or festivals, there will be an episode that shows Sazae-san going

to a festival wearing a yukata7. In this sense, Sazae-san was reflective of the everyday

dynamics of Japanese culture and reinforced these ideas through the particularities of

context-laden symbols within each episode. This shows how not only did anime have the

ability to demonstrate how Japanese people live to a certain extent, but also reinforce

                                                                                                               7  Japanese  summer  traditional  wear.    

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specific cultural practices by reminding its viewers to engage with common national

customs.

Beyond the cultural reinforcement of a routine everyday life, Sazae-san also

reflects the cultural transformation of women’s roles in Japan after the postwar period.

While Sazae-san plays the role of the warm, home-building housewife, her attitudes in

regards to women’s societal and political treatment (Lee 187) are representative of the

general women’s liberation movement that was evolving in the postwar period. The

flawed, yet resourceful Sazae-san often undermines the dominant ideology of exclusive

masculinity, and is shown to declare that “men too must strive for women’s liberation”

(Lee 187). The rise of feminism as a transnational movement has been well-documented,

shown by infamous Japanese feminists like Hiratsuka Raicho, who took inspiration from

Swedish feminists like Ellen Key and playwright Henrik Ibsen (Lowy 2007). But Sazae-

san, like Hiratsuka, takes the ideologies of a Japanese strain of feminism and portrays her

thoughts throughout the anime. Evidence of this is that there is still a strong focus on

preserving community, an internal focus on family life and finding dignity in one’s

position and role within the family. Rarely do the female characters of Sazae-san

blatantly engage in the linguistic rhetoric of postwar feminism, though there have been

episodes in which the subject has been engaged, as shown in the case of Sazae-san

speaking up at her women’s liberation group. Sazae-san’s approach to portraying

feminist ideologies is often more roundabout and discreet, showing the eponymous

character Sazae gaining the upper hand on male characters by showing a deftness when it

comes to both maintaining the household and engaging other people in the public sphere.

For example, throughout the series, readers regularly see Sazae gently reprimanding her

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husband for not being able to do simple household tasks or overpowering a male

character in a self-defense class (episode 2). This series draws heavily from referential

material regarding the geopolitical and sociocultural climate of the time. Far from being

stateless, works like Sazae-san that looked inwardly to deal with the fragile and liminal

state of Japanese national and cultural identity after the war built another foundational

aspect of modern day anime, namely the genre of iyashikei. This once again reinforces

the idea that far from being a culturally sterile medium, the development of anime has

been deeply rooted in the historical context that inevitably affected its creators. This does

not necessarily mean that its cultural specificity translates into problems of transnational

dissemination, however. Viewers can find meaning and develop their own readings of

these international texts, with or without the help of localization teams. The claim that

Iwabuchi makes -- namely, that the global appeal of anime comes primarily from its

ability to divorce itself from the cultural specificity of Japan -- seems unfounded when

we consider how certain strains of feminist ideologies that are relevant at the time

continue to make appearances in shows as popular as Sazae-san. This show, and entire

genres like iyashikei, are developed to respond to the unique social needs of a Japanese

postwar society.

As a uniquely well-defined genre that is difficult to find in other cultures,

iyashikei is loosely defined as “healing” in Japanese, and often refers to a descriptive

genre of narratives that focus on soothing stories which display little to no conflict and,

instead, focus on a nostalgic and occasionally melancholic sense of fulfillment and

harmony. In short, they are narratives that encourage a spiritual sense of healing, away

from the painful realities of everyday life. Sazae-san, both in its comic and anime forms,

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was a foundational predecessor of this narrative style, in that it was an apparent healing

medium for its suffering postwar viewership. The show’s focus on personal, spiritual

development, fostering genuine relationships among characters, with narratives focusing

on the smaller pleasures and mysteries of life, remains fundamental to the iyashikei genre

today. The phenomenally high viewership of Sazae-san is evidence in itself of how much

the show spoke to the needs of the public. Unlike the science fiction-inspired genre of

mecha, which focuses on the spectacle and violence of often techno-dystopian landscapes

and narratives, iyashikei encourages mutual empathy, and in many ways, a rejection of

orientalizing and alienating characteristics. The focus of many iyashikei genre narratives

tends to revolve around topics that most cultures can relate to, at least on a surface level,

such as family, personal relationships, and self-discovery.

This does not mean that the creators purposefully excise symbolic representations

of “Japaneseness” in their narratives. After all, stereotypical depictions of “Japaneseness”

(e.g. geisha, ninjas, Mt. Fuji, cherry blossoms) still remain unique facets of Japanese

culture, though these symbols have been largely globalized for international consumption

and represent Eastern exoticism. The strength of the iyashikei genre comes from the ways

in which these symbols are framed to have an affective appeal towards ambient mood

regulation, focusing on the consoling and pacification of the viewer (Roquet 88). The

scenes in which the symbols above are portrayed often are accompanied by soothing

background music and foley, pale and unobtrusive color palettes, and the use of peaceful

scenic background shots, all of which gesture towards vague feelings of affective

nostalgia and lower the barrier to empathy for the characters. The fostering of empathy

for characters and for other sociocultural contexts within iyashikei simply allows for the

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existence of these symbols to pass through the narrative, with an overriding message of

humanism through their emphasis on the typical, yet never banal, depiction of everyday

life and common existential dilemmas -- such as finding spiritual fulfillment and a raison

d’etre apart from physical and economic survival. While creators occasionally break from

these archetypal characteristics of the iyashikei genre, the characteristics first exhibited

by Sazae-san largely continue to hold great appeal for the Japanese viewership, as

indicated by the “healing boom” that began in the mid-1990s within Japan (Roquet 89).

Sazae-san’s continued, conspicuous success to the present day indicates broader appeal,

beyond its capacity for soothing viewers who have been the victims of traumatic

historical upheavals. This continual addressing of specific social needs through anime

shows how the medium in itself is not stateless in context.

The fact that the rise of the iyashikei movement coincided with the devastating

events of the Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo attacks is unsurprising, since both

events reinforced the uncertainty of both social order and modern identity8 in a relatively

short amount of time. Yet the need to create narrative spaces in which a calm affect

encourages healing and gradual reintegration into reality has made iyashikei a prime

genre for the rebuilding of identity, through a kind of social redemption in which viewers

can emerge from these narratives as passive witnesses of current events with the

resilience to face conflicts and contradictions of contemporary identity. Effective

                                                                                                               8  In  Yumiko  Iida’s  essay,  “Between the Technique of Living an Endless Routine and the Madness of Absolute Degree Zero: Japanese Identity and the Crisis of Modernity in the 1990,” she speaks of economic stagnation of the 1990s, which led to “a multiple breakdown of political, economic, and sociocultural orders and induced a visible shift in the mood of society reflecting an end to a glorious age of Japanese economic success on a global stage” (Iida 424).  

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iyashikei genre works encourage a feeling of “decentered subjectivity,” in which viewers

“dissolve discrete identities into moods of open-ended affective exploration, free from the

usual demands of their social and discursive selves” (Roquet 103). In this sense, iyashikei

serves as an ideal backdrop for both cultural liberation and redefinition, particularly in the

case of anime, because of its exploration of sociocultural issues, like the case of Sazae-

san, and possibilities for change, as shown in Astro Boy. The dissolution of bound

identities gives rise to the potential for new or altered definitions of group identities and a

means to continue to find new modes of reconstructing the national self. Instead of

statelessness, anime can be one cultural medium in which we can recreate different

“stateful” modes that define a national culture.

Today, Sazae-san and other iyashikei series that have come afterwards seek to

create ambient spaces through the use of purposeful soothing aesthetics and heavy-

handed nostalgia. In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym claims that there are two

strains of nostalgia that encourage the formation of nationalism: restorative nostalgia and

reflective nostalgia. While restorative nostalgia refers to the process of “rebuild[ing] the

lost home and patch[ing] up the memory gaps,” reflective nostalgia focuses on the

“longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance” (Boym 41). The iyashikei

genre is effective in sustaining the tensions of Japanese identity because it exemplifies an

ability to represent both restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia simultaneously. By

revolving around depictions of nostalgic imagery and themes, iyashikei tends to focus on

narratives that provide a reminder of things that have been lost, and a simultaneous

solution of how things can be remade, though never in an unaltered state. Examples of

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such narratives will be discussed more deeply later in Chapter Two, focusing primarily

on the work of Shinkai Makoto’s Kimi no Na Wa, translated as Your Name.

In the case of Sazae-san, the show’s repetitive iterations of an episodic structure,

revolving around vignettes about traditional family life and a moment of interaction with

the titular character at the end of each episode, cement the viewer’s relationship with the

fictional nostalgia-ridden narrative. This structure shows the way in which Sazae-san can

be a restoratively nostalgic work. While its episodic narratives remind viewers of

traditional customs and of provincial lifestyles of the past, it also serves as a reminder of

what kind of activities one should engage in, depending on the seasons, as well as what

foods one should eat and how to look for a comparatively humbler kind of happiness

through familial relationships. Sazae-san is incredibly effective in the formation of

Japaneseness in anime, because not only does it remind viewers what has been lost in the

postwar era, but, through repetitive patterns, also reveals how to sustain the motions of

that everyday Japaneseness and the consequent healing nostalgia. However, in

representing these nostalgic social customs and traditional three-generation family

structures, the show also acts as a work of reflectively nostalgic work, because it serves

as a constant reminder of what has been lost.9 This tension between reflective nostalgia

and restorative nostalgia permeates the work of Sazae-san. While the show gives the

implied message that we can never return to that exact time period, it also encourages the

notion that one can rebuild an iterative version of this period through embodied and

repetitive practice, and find happiness and a sense of collective home in that process. In

                                                                                                               9  In  William  Lee’s  article,  “From  Sazae-­‐san  to  Crayon  Shin-­‐chan:  Family  Anime,  Social  Change,  and  Nostalgia  in  Japan,”  he  outlines  the  decline  in  three-­‐generation  familial  households  in  Japan  and  how  this  transition  has  been  reflected  in  all-­‐ages  family  anime  like  Sazae-­‐san.      

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this sense, one can continue to rebuild and reiterate this nostalgic strain of Japaneseness

through anime, even in the face of overwhelming Western influence. Once again,

contrary to Iwabuchi’s claim that anime is stateless and odorless, this shows that anime

remains a medium which can recreate a kind of cultural “statefulness” through its

interactions with its viewers.

The fundamental structure of Sazae-san has not changed since the beginning of its

broadcast run and continues to this day. In its repetitive structure and the restorative

nostalgia that it advocates (thus redefining Japaneseness), Sazae-san has been raised to

the level of modern myth, in the sense that the various symbols represented in the

franchise “presuppose a signifying consciousness, that one can reason about them [the

symbols] while discounting their substance” (Barthes 108). More significantly, the

iterations of Japaneseness that are represented in Sazae-san and later iyashikei works are

rife with symbols of Japanese cultural identity that do “not trouble about contradictions”

(Barthes 58). Japanese identity can retain both tradition and modernity, transience and

permanence, and both Eastern and Western cultures. Perhaps most significantly, it can

represent all of these dichotomies without nullifying the other. This may be because of

the premise that Japanese modern identity is still at least grounded in the assimilation of

“contradictory” foreign influences, at least in the public national imagination (Iwabuchi

60). To be able to bring Western influences into Japanese culture, and temper them in a

manner that is appealing to the Japanese public, remains a foundational principle of

modern Japanese cultural ideology. Within this ideology is a fundamental kind of

contradiction that nevertheless strengthens the sense of Japaneseness in hybrid cultural

mediums like anime.

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Unlike Astro Boy, which was made in some part with the hope that it would be

eligible for international consumption, Sazae-san was never exported to the West for

global consumption. If we recall that it has become a phenomenon that has spanned

decades, and has become a tradition in its own right, Sazae-san is an example of anime

that cannot be considered “stateless” by any means. Inasmuch as there are traditional

symbols of Japanese culture sprinkled throughout the series (as there are for most anime

series), Sazae-san shows how, through their narrative platform, shows can recreate what

constitutes Japaneseness, in the face of traumatic historical and sociocultural realities

through encouraging the adoption of contemporary ideologies and social practices. This

re-creation demonstrates how Japaneseness, like most kinds of cultural ethos, is never a

static, immutable core, but something that evolves in the context of the current era. If this

is the case, we cannot view anime as a form devoid of any kind of Japaneseness, even if

creators were purposefully trying to excise cultural particularities out of the narrative.

This is precisely because anime, and any art form for that matter, does not develop in a

cultural vacuum. Inevitably, facets of the culture’s traditions and current anxieties will

filter into how a narrative is told and presented to the public. Simply divorcing the

narrative content from its cultural particularities is not something that can occur because

of a creator’s desire to do so, and reductively claiming that anime is uniformly “stateless”

is dangerous when applied to such a diverse platform that supports genres that are as

different from one another as mecha and iyashikei. As we see in the foundational anime

works of Astro Boy and Sazae-san, creators continue to struggle over the definition and

formation of Japanese identity through the medium of anime.

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While struggles to establish a Japanese identity through the animation medium in

terms of style, narrative, and physical form were a source of anxiety for early Japanese

animators, whether these conflicts of national and cultural identity are still relevant to the

postmodern present must still be analyzed. Anime culture scholar Susan Napier has

suggested that anime represents a liminal space where viewers and fans can participate in

forming a kind of “postethnic” identity, where Western features and Japanese features

can be combined seamlessly and encourage a mode of identity exploration that is simply

not possible in other entertainment media forms (Napier 27). The doe-eyed, bright haired

humanoid anime figures might be considered to resemble the Japanese standard features

poorly; however, this point seems largely irrelevant, as animation rarely seems to be

constrained by the look of actual human beings. Additionally, the work of original anime

series -- with its unique language characteristics such as regional accents, and widespread

cultural assumptions -- makes it difficult to divorce the national origins of a piece from

the content that is presented. For example, in Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age,

Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano analyzes the transnational qualities of the film “Hotel Venus,”

which was produced in Japan, but had all of its characters speak Korean and is set in

modern day Korea. Wada-Marciano points out that despite the fact that the work takes

place in Korea, there are certain cultural assumptions about Japan’s view of the Korean

people, its own ambivalent imperialist relationship, and consequent gaze on the subjected

Korean community that are unique to Japan’s sociocultural and historical context (Wada-

Marciano 111). These assumptions and depictions of the Korean “Other” cannot be

ignored simply because the work happens to be in the Korean language or take place in

Seoul. In this sense, anime is much the same inside or outside of Japan, in that even

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though it may portray characters who do not “look Japanese,” or take place in fantastical

worlds and backdrops that do not resemble Japan, the way the work constructs a

particular narrative, or presents a certain character, will inevitably gesture towards the

culture that it came from. Even when a work is trying to be culturally “stateless” or retain

a different culture’s contextual “statefulness,” we see how the particularities of the

narrative and its representation of characters gesture towards its native context. The

viewer may or may not be aware of these cultural textures and contours due to his or her

own lack of foreign cultural literacy; however, this does not mean that these differences

have been excised.

2.2 Miyazaki Hayao, Localization, and the Pseudo-Western

Regardless of the globalizing influences that anime is subjected to by both

Japanese and international consumers (alike through localization initiatives), cultural

differences continue to remain evident. In order to support this claim, I will consider the

scholarship revolving around the works of Miyazaki Hayao, who is arguably the anime

film director known best in the West. Extensive work has already been done on the

cultural differences between the historical particularities of Miyazaki Hayao’s works and

the differences between Japanese and English versions of his films (Eriko Ogihara-

Schuck 2014, Shiro Yoshioka 2014). Ogihara-Schuck stresses the influences and

continuing evidence of Japanese religion, and in particular, animism in Miyazaki’s

works, showing how features like the lack of a firmly defined good/evil binary, the

abundance of spirits that represent inanimate or abstract objects, and the reluctance to

infantilize these abstract entities is apparent in the verbal and visual script of Miyazaki’s

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narrative, as well as in the paratext10 of his films. In contrast, Ogihara-Schuck compares

the localized American versions of his films -- which reinforce the existence of good/evil

in a manner that resonates with America’s Christian ideals -- and also market his works

as more cheerful, child-friendly through itheir promotional content (Ogihara-Schuck 69).

Further, in the American versions, spirits are made more diminutive, and this is expressed

in the language that the human characters use. The primary purpose of these spirits is to

exoticize an imaginary past or future (Ogihara-Schuck 78). She goes on to describe the

extensive processes that go into the localization process, showing that the act of excising

certain Japanese cultural characteristics is far from simple, implying that there is a kind

of Japaneseness in the films that Miyazaki creates, regardless of its global popularity.

Yoshioka Shiro takes a historiographical approach to how Japaneseness is

represented in Miyazaki’s works and how the focus on traditional depictions of Japanese

culture, such as “samurai, classic asistocratic literature, or Zen temple architecture,” in

defining the Japanese cultural ethos was criticized by Miyazaki (Yoshioka 260). Instead,

Miyazaki focuses on the existence of the “pseudo-Western,” a kind of Western façade

with a recreated Japanese aesthetic that, in today’s society, is as “Japanese” as the more

traditional symbols mentioned above. Here again, Japanese tradition and culture is not

static, but a dynamic and fluid force that is constantly changing. In an interview about the

aesthetic choices for his critically acclaimed movie, Spirited Away, Miyazaki Hayao

states that he gained great inspiration from the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architectural

Museum, which acts like an open museum for Taisho and Meiji period buildings. He

says, “I like the pseudo-Western style buildings from that period [Meiji and Taisho].

                                                                                                               10  In  this  context,  paratext  involves  movie  posters,  promotional  videos,  franchise-­‐related  souvenirs  and  paraphernalia.    

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There [Edo Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum], I somehow feel really nostalgic”

(qtd. in Yoshioka 260). Like the use of hybrid cultural Meiji-style buildings that stir up

nostalgia for the past in film, the use of restorative and reflective nostalgia in anime

shows the semiotic fluidity of history and culture. In being able both to lament and

recreate the past, Miyazaki uses nostalgia within the context of a dynamic “Japaneseness”

and in doing so, continues to reinforce not only interpretations of the past, but its

relationship to the present as well (Yoshisoka 261). Through nostalgia (as seen with the

example of Sazae-san), not only the past, but also the present, can be reshaped and re-

narrated, sometimes quite explicitly through the medium of anime. From this

perspective, Japanese culture is resilient in the face of Western domination, and has the

flexibility to absorb it in a manner that suits the wakon-yosai (Japanese spirit-Western

technology) ideology. In being able to do so, it represents a facet of Japan, perhaps even

more so because of this “pseudo-Western” element. Miyazaki Hayao remains one of the

most prominent animators globally, and his work has performed phenomenally well in a

multitude of cultures. This does not mean that his works are stateless or odorless, but that

despite these films’ retention of symbols and explorations of Japanese identity, the global

viewership can continue to engage with the international elements of the text.

While these are only two scholars of many who have focused on how elements of

Japanese identity continue to be disputed in anime, and the methods by which

glocalization processes may influence this representation, our discussion reveals how this

issue continues to exist on the periphery of Japanese popular culture and the related

scholarship. One recent anime film that deals with the complex dialectical contours of

Japanese identity is Shinkai Makoto’s Kimi no na wa, translated as Your Name. This

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film’s remarkable popularity, which displaced Miyazaki’s critically acclaimed works

(like Princess Mononoke, and Totoro) from the top of the box office, reflects how its

exploration of Japanese cultural identity and its relationship to nostalgia and ideologies of

hybridity continue to be a theme relevant to the anxieties and dilemmas of postmodern

identity. In the following chapter, I will be exploring the various thematic narrative

elements of Kimi no na wa that explore these tensions.

2.3 A Caveat: Nostalgia and Capitalistic Modes of Strategic Self-Orientalizing

A critical perspective that continues to arise in Japanese popular culture

scholarship is the issue regarding strategic self-Orientalizing on the part of Japanese

anime creators, in order to appeal to a wider global audience and play to the expectations

of the West in a manner that appeals to Orientalist sensibilities. Otaku culture scholar

Azuma Hiroki observes how fans of anime culture’s obsession with Japanese imagery is,

in fact, a manifestation of a desire to create a “pseudo-Japan” with the materials that were

given to Japanese creators by the West (Azuma 20). In his view, this pseudo-Japan is the

only option for current viewers to engage with a native cultural identity, and “we [the

Japanese] can only construct an image of the Japanese cityscape by picturing family

restaurants, convenience stores and ‘love hotels.’ And it is within this impoverished

premise that we have long exercised our distorted imaginary” (Azuma 20). Within this

view, Japanese identity can never be divorced from the West: Miyazaki’s “pseudo-West”

is reflected in the otaku’s “pseudo-Japan,” and what is left is merely a series of simulacra,

infinitely malleable and without an essential core beyond the consumption and

domestication of outside forces. In short, Said’s initial observations of Orientalism as an

authoritative and the modern strategy of the West in order to dominate the Orient has

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taken a dialectical turn in which Japanese identity is never able to exist on its own in the

national imaginary, without the mediating presence of the West. As much as the West

fetishizes and essentializes the East, the same is done to the West from the Eastern

perspective, and these tendencies come out frequently in anime as creators juxtapose

modernity and tradition together and use that tension to recreate new definitions of

Japanese identity. Self-orientalization, both in media and in the national tendency to find

imaginary features that define cultural uniqueness, creates spaces where alternative

identity formations can develop, and while this does not necessarily dissolve the

unbalanced power relationship between the “orient” and the “occident,” it undermines the

unilateral dynamic of orient as solely a victim, constantly subjected to the Occidental

imaginary (Lu 178). In short, as much as the West may practice forms of orientalism in

order to make sense of the East, Eastern cultures also practice their own form of

Occidentalism in order to make sense of the West, and apply their own imaginary and

cultural logic.

This awareness of the global appeal of Japaneseness as depictions of traditional

stereotypes and overworked tropes, and the ability of producers to make conscientious

use of restorative nostalgia for the international community of viewers shows the

flexibility of the medium. This restoration occurs when those same narratives are able to

simultaneously display a kind of hybrid reflective and restorative nostalgia for its own

native viewers, which creates a complex tension that allows viewers to try to engage with

the dynamics of understanding loss. Reflective nostalgia emphasizes the influences of an

imperfect memory and relationship to the past, while restorative nostalgia invites the

rebuilding or reinvention of tradition. As shown before, anime becomes a fertile

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environment for opportunities to rebuild a cultural identity through strategic hybridism.

This is especially the case with the iyashikei genre, which thrives on feelings of

atmospheric nostalgia. As we saw in our discussion of with Sazae-san, part of the show’s

remarkable appeal seems to stem from not only its pleasant displays of nostalgia for a

time-long-past, but in its ability to be a kind of how-to manual to go through the motions

of Japanese daily life and recreate normalcy and identity in the face of postwar national

trauma. Such is the appeal of genres like iyashikei. For international viewers, the imagery

of quaint, modern Japanese lifestyles (i.e. Sazae-san), samurai, geisha, and even the

consumption of a dystopian imaginary, usually in the form of wasted technological

landscapes (e.g. Akira, Neon Genesis Evangelion) can only be restorative, because they

largely did not experience the fragmentation that comes with collective national trauma.

All they can see is the holistic efforts of a restorative nostalgia, which seeks to alter and

rebuild historical narrativity; while this is appealing in its own right, it perhaps loses the

immediate poignancy of those who are also seeing it simultaneously from the lens of

reflective nostalgia. In this sense, international audiences do not have an immediate

desire to restore lost cultures, because they have not experienced the loss that is perhaps

foundational to understanding anime’s ability to represent reflective nostalgia.

I believe that producers are deeply aware of the appeal of this kind of restorative

nostalgia for the international viewership, and continue to go through processes of

localization and re-self-orientalization in order to appeal to both native and international

tastes. Anime creators continue to cater to the desires of their native public, because that

is where the bulk of their economic support comes from. As economic scholar H.K. Lee

notes, the international market for anime continues to be “much smaller than the domestic

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one” (Lee 12); however, there is an awareness that anime has a huge global following and

they must negotiate with this audience as well. Thus practices of self-orientalization or,

on the opposite side of the spectrum, broad “Occidentalizing internationalization,” may

impact the methods in which “Japaneseness” is portrayed and transmitted on the screen

(Lu 176). Whether these strategies to mediate global influence and native identity, which

anime seeks to maintain is a sign of oriental subjugation to the West or a new kind of

power remains unclear. Can the existence of a deliberately decontextualized form of

cultural identity that is consumed by a global audience be rich enough to create “a

conceptual vernacular that would unite the diverse cultural constituencies” (Jensen 1997)

of both its global viewership and its native audience without compromising one or the

other? The analysis that I provide above about the role of nostalgia in the (re)creation of

identity through popular culture forms suggests that one can. Certainly, self-

Orientalization is happening and articulates parts of Japanese identity both through anime

and other popular culture mediums, yet it is no longer the case that this kind of discursive

orientalism is necessarily Eurocentric. Its continued existence is centered on the Japanese

self, and if cultural ethos exists as a form of fluid essentialism, and not a static core, then

it can be the case that even modes of self-orientalization can bring about an empowering

mode of identity re-creation -- particularly in the context of Orientalism/Occidentalism as

an ongoing dialectic.

This analysis seeks to look more closely at the relationship between nostalgia, the

iyashikei genre, and the study of identity in highly popular films like Kimi no na wa, as

examples of a “crucial nexus of unease about culture itself and its transmission and

stability” (Ivy 10). Japanese culture scholar Marilyn Ivy gestures towards the possibility

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that consumer cultures, in which anime is an undeniable force, may exist to provide a

“loss of nostalgia-that is, the loss of the desire to long for what is lost because one has

found the lost object” (Ivy 10). Ivy goes on to claim that perhaps, this loss of nostalgia

through consumer culture may be far worse than the existence of the original elegiac

nostalgia that constantly reminds one that something indeed has been lost. Instead, the

“consuming and consumable pleasures of nostalgia as an ambivalent longing to erase the

temporal difference between subject and object of desire, shot through the impossibility

but also the ultimate unwillingness to reinstate what was lost” (Ivy 10). While this largely

does not seem to be the case for Kimi no na wa on the surface, nor in the larger scope of

Shinkai Makoto’s approach to film-making, I will analyze Kimi no na wa through Ivy’s

possible claim and see whether the film seeks to be a work that can be ambiguously

categorized as iyashikei, with the purpose of eliminating or numbing the audience to the

overarching awareness of loss.

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CHAPTER  3:  TRANSFORMATIVE  TRADITIONS  IN  SHINKAI  MAKOTO’S  KIMI  NO  NA  WA  

    Kimi  no  Na  Wa  is  an  anime  film  that  was  released  in  Japan  on  August  26,  

2016,  and  was  directed  by  Shinkai  Makoto.  Based  on  a  novel  that  Shinkai  wrote,  

which  was  released  a  month  prior  to  the  film,  the  story  revolves  around  a  young  

high  school  boy  and  girl  who  mysteriously  swap  bodies  on  a  regular  basis,  for  a  

period  of  about  a  couple  months.  The  boy,  Taki,  lives  in  the  urban  sprawl  of  central  

Tokyo,  where  he  regularly  attends  high  school,  goes  to  his  part-­‐time  job  at  an  Italian  

restaurant,  and  aspires  to  be  an  architect.  In  contrast,  the  girl,  Mitsuha,  lives  in  the    

countryside  town  of  Itomori  in  Gifu  Prefecture’s  mountainous  Hida  region.  Mitsuha  

is  the  daughter  of  the  town  mayor  and  comes  from  a  family  that  is  heavily  tied  to  the  

traditions  of  the  Miyamizu  Shrine,  which  serves  the  town’s  local  deity.  Throughout  

the  film,  we  see  Mitsuha  performing  her  duties  to  the  shrine  as  a  miko  (shrine  

maiden),  making  kuchikamizake  (a  traditional  sake  made  by  chewing  on  rice  and  

using  the  saliva  to  ferment  the  contents),  and  going  on  pilgrimages  to  make  

offerings  to  the  god  of  Miyamizu  Shrine.  In  the  background,  there  is  news  of  Comet  

Tiamat,  which  will  be  making  its  way  across  the  sky  of  Japan  within  a  few  days.  This  

comet  eventually  becomes  a  source  of  great  beauty  and  great  destruction  for  the  

village  of  Itomori,  as  a  piece  of  the  comet  crashes  into  the  small  village,  decimating  

both  its  surroundings  and  the  Itomori  population.  In  order  to  change  the  course  of  

history  and  manipulate  time,  Taki  and  Mitsuha  take  advantage  of  their  body-­‐

swapping  experience  to  try  to  create  another  thread  of  history  in  which  nobody  in  

Itomori  would  die.  During  the  time  that  these  two  characters  continue  to  body-­‐

swap,  they  become  aware  of  the  difficulties  and  nuances  of  one  another’s  lives,  

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encouraging  a  kind  of  understanding  and  empathy  for  one  another  that  would  likely  

be  impossible  if  such  an  occult  phenomenon  had  not  happened.  In  being  able  to  

walk  in  each  other’s  shoes,  they  learn  not  to  simplify  or  fetishize  the  experience  of  

living  as  the  other.    

 

Figure  4.  The  promotional  poster  for  Kimi  no  na  wa.  

 In  experiencing  the  curious  phenomenon  of  body-­‐swapping,  both  Mitsuha  

and  Taki  are  able  to  experience  life  in  each  other’s  shoes,  so  that  they  become  in  

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diametric  opposites  to  one  another:  boy/girl,  urban/rural,  modernity/traditions,  

and  more.  Despite  the  fairly  modern  sensibilities  of  Mitsuha’s  lifestyle  (one  can  find  

girls’  fashion  magazines,  vending  machines,  and  all  kinds  of  modern  technological  

symbols  strewn  across  the  countryside  backdrop),  Mitsuha  nevertheless  becomes  

an  embodiment  of  furusato  (hometown):  of  pre-­‐modern  traditions  that  consist  of  

communal  intimacy,  folkloric  practices,  the  pre-­‐rational  and  occult  pagan  belief  

systems.  This  community  still  revolves  around  rituals  that  transcends  into  a  system  

of  symbols,  which  connects  the  spiritual  and  immaterial  to  the  physical.  This  can  be  

seen  in  the  practice  of  weaving  cords  that  is  among  the  most  critical  of  Mitsuha’s  

shrine  traditions  and  the  way  this  cord  becomes  a  means  of  connecting  Taki  to  

Mitsuha’s  timeline.  The  cord  becomes  the  physical  manifestation  of  the  immaterial  

concept  historical  time.  At  one  point  in  the  film,  the  matriarchal  grandmother  of  the  

family  says  that  “one  thousand  years  of  history  is  etched  into  our  braided  cords.”  

She  goes  on  to  narrate  how  a  devastating  fire  in  their  village  destroyed  the  shrine  

and  all  of  the  documents  that  outlined  the  significance  and  meaning  behind  their  

practices  and  festivals.  Yet  even  as  the  words  and  the  meanings  of  rituals  disappear  

with  the  burning  of  those  documents  or  are  altered  through  the  passage  of  time,  the  

grandmother  states  that,    

“Two   hundred   years   ago,   scandal   maker   Mayugoro’s   bathroom  caught  on   fire  and  burned  down   this  whole  area.  The  shrine  and  old  documents  were  destroyed  and  this  is  known  as  The  Great  Fire  of  Mayugoro.  So  the  meaning  of  our  festivals  became  unknown  and  only  the  form  lived  on.  But  even  if  words  are  lost,  tradition  should  be  handed  down  and  that  is  the  important  task  we  at  Miyamizu    Shrine  have.”      

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What  is  implied  is  that  it  is  not  so  much  the  exact  meaning  or  the  words  behind  

these  traditions  that  must  be  preserved,  but  that  there  is  inherent  importance  in  

“going  through  the  motions”  behind  them.  Through  these  motions,  one  is  able  to  

build  and  maintain  communal  identity,  regardless  of  whether  the  historical  

significance  these  events  may  have  held  in  the  past  is  remembered  or  not.  While  the  

grandmother  shows  regret  over  the  loss  of  original  meaning,  she  recognizes  that  the  

absence  of  rigid  coded  systems  allows  for  reinterpretation  and  rediscovery  of  

origins.  This  is  a  direct  example  of  Svetlana  Boym’s  concept  of  restorative  nostalgia,  

where  she  states  that  “what  drives  restorative  nostalgia  is  not  the  sentiment  of  

distance  and  longing,  but  rather  the  anxiety  of  those  who  draw  attention  to  

historical  incongruities  between  past  and  present,  and  thus  question  the  wholeness  

and  continuity  of  the  restored  tradition”  (Boym  44-­‐45).  The  unstable  semiotics  of  

nostalgia11  continue  to  give  meaning  to  their  activities,  even  in  the  face  of  

apocalyptic  destruction,  as  described  by  the  Great  Miyagoro  Fire,  or  encroaching  

political  agendas,  as  is  seen  in  the  figure  of  Mitsuha’s  father,  who  has  let  go  of  the  

shrine’s  originary  traditions  and  roots  in  order  to  pursue  a  political  career.  Even  as  

the  meanings  behind  these  activities  change,  there  is  a  sense  that  there  is  a  

                                                                                                               11  In  this  context,  I  am  referring  to  nostalgia  as  that  which  consists  of  “reflective  nostalgia”  and  “restorative  nostalgia.”  These  are  the  same  terms  discussed  in  my  first  chapter.  Reflective  nostalgia  emphasizes  “in  algia,  in  longing  and  loss,  the  imperfect  process  of  remembrance”  (Boym  41).  Restorative  nostalgia  emphasizes  “nostos  and  proposes  to  rebuild  the  lost  home  and  patch  up  the  memory  gaps”  (Boym  41).  Essentially,  reflective  nostalgia  focuses  on  the  individual  loss  and  am  aware  of  the  “gap  between  identity  and  remembrance”  (Boym  50).  whereas  restorative  nostalgia  drives  “national  and  nationalist  revivals  all  over  the  world,  which  engage  in  anti-­‐modern  myth-­‐making  of  history  by  means  of  a  return  to  national  symbols  and  myths”  (Boym  41).  

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continuum  of  embedded  significance  of  tradition,  as  long  as  one  continues  to  go  

through  the  motions  of  the  practice.          

 3.1  Consumption  and  Self-­‐Orientalization      Mitsuha’s  obvious  discomfort  with  her  position  as  a  representation  of  archaic  

traditions  stems  from  not  only  her  desire  to  escape  her  drab  and  mundane  rural  

lifestyle,  but  from  her  ongoing  existence  as  as  an  example  of  self-­‐orientalization.  As  

stated  in  the  first  chapter,  orientalization  in  this  context  refers  to  Edward  Said’s  

original  concept,  in  which  there  is  a  consistent  focus  on  the  spectacle  of  difference  

from  a  Eurocentric  perspective.  What  results  is  an  often  essentialist  depiction  of  

non-­‐Western  cultures,  so  that  traditional  practices,  customs,  and  paraphernalia  

gravitate  toward  the  most  fetishized  features  within  Orientalist  visions  and  

discourse.  At  one  point  in  the  film,  viewers  see  Mitsuha  dressed  in  full  traditional  

miko  (shrine  priestess)  garb,  performing  a  public  dance.  Later,  she  makes  

kuchikamizake  in  front  of  her  communal  audience  by  chewing  on  pieces  of  rice  and  

spitting  the  rice  back  out,  which  disgusts  some  of  her  classmates  as  an  act  that  

appears  perverse  and  unclean.  In  making  her  traditional  practices  largely  a  public  

affair,  her  existence  continues  to  inform  and  act  as  a  point  of  orientalization  of  past  

practices  for  the  citizens  of  Itomori  themselves.  During  her  performance,  Mitsuha’s  

friend  Tessie  informs  the  audience  (both  those  who  are  viewing  Mitsuha  in  the  

narrative,  as  well  as  the  audience  who  is  viewing  the  film)  of  the  significance  of  

kuchikamizake  as  an  offering  to  the  gods,  and  the  process  in  how  it’s  made.  The  

kuchikamizake,  which  is  an  embodiment  of  tradition  as  defined  by  Itomori  citizens,  

and  of  ties  to  an  unknowable  past,  is  later  referred  to  as  “half  of  her  [Mitsuha].”  This  

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“half”  of  Mitsuha  does  not  refer  singularly  to  the  kuchikamizake,  but  also  to  this  

constant  exemplification  of  orientalization  of  traditions  to  the  village  people,  which  

is  shown  to  be  her  duty  throughout  the  film.  She  constantly  reminds  the  village  

people  and  outsiders,  like  Taki,  of  the  importance  of  the  local,  and  in  turn,  reminds  

them  of  a  half  of  their  self-­‐identity.    

 

                                 

Figure  5-­‐6.  Screen  shots  of  Mitsuha’s  miko  garb  and  making  kuchikamizake.  

Self-­‐orientalization  problematizes  the  sanctity  of  past  traditions,  and,  at  least  

in  the  world  that  Shinkai  Makoto  portrays  in  Kimi  No  Na  Wa,  is  also  a  critical  part  of  

discovering  and  redefining  a  complete  Japanese  self-­‐identity.  The  term  

“Orientalism”  already  connotes  an  inherent  relationship  to  the  Occident,  in  which  

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identity  is  developed  not  in  an  independent  and  self-­‐fulfilling  mode  of  creation  and  

recreation,  but  in  conjunction  with  an  unequal  relationship  to  the  West.  It  

emphasizes  difference,  and  foregoes  any  possibility  of  similarity  or  independence  

from  the  Western  ideologies  that  have  been  instilled  in  both  the  medium  and  the  

message.  Certainly,  on  the  one  hand,  self-­‐orientalization  reveals  how  purposeful  

depictions  of  one’s  traditions  can  undermine  the  unilateral  power  dynamics  of  the  

universal  West  and  the  peripheral,  compromised  East  in  a  manner  that  encourages  

desire  for  and  consumption  of  Eastern  cultures  by  the  West.  Occidentalization,  

which  seems  to  go  hand-­‐in-­‐hand  with  self-­‐orientalization  also  serves  as  a  mode  in  

which  Asian  traditions  can  use  the  West  in  similar  sites  of  exoticism  and  

comparison.  For  example,  within  the  film,  we  see  Taki  working  at  a  posh  Italian  

restaurant  and  we  also  see  Mitsuha  fetishize  the  elegance  of  Western-­‐style  desserts  

and  cafes,  all  of  which  provide  a  stark  comparison  to  Mitsuha’s  lifestyle  in  Itomori.  

As  stated  in  the  first  chapter,  while  the  West  fetishizes  the  Orient  in  its  national  

imaginary,  the  same  is  done  by  the  East.  However,  it  does  not  change  the  essential  

paradigm  of  a  binary  in  which  the  West  continues  to  act  as  a  site  of  dominance  and  

of  universality.  Even  as  self-­‐orientalization  serves  as  an  undermining,  it  can  only  be  

achieved  by  admitting  to  one’s  own  peripheral,  local  status.      

In  the  small  town  of  Itomori,  we  see  a  kind  of  battle  between  the  desires  of  

the  global  (represented  by  a  urban  Tokyo  lifestyle)  and  the  local  (symbolized  by  the  

rural  Itomori),  and  the  process  of  self-­‐orientalization  on  the  part  of  Mitsuha  

constantly  gestures  towards  that  tension.  This  tension  is  what  allows  both  nostalgia  

and  self-­‐orientalization  to  thrive,  even  in  the  remote  peripheries  of  Japan,  and  these  

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tensions  are  what  make  the  story  so  appealing  to  both  Japanese  and  international  

viewers  alike.  The  struggle  between  the  local  and  the  global  is  a  universal  one  at  this  

point,  particularly  for  nations  that  feel  like  they  have  been  compromised  by  Western  

influences.  Yet  what  is  perhaps  unique  about  Kimi  No  Na  Wa’s  presentation  of  this  

battle  and  of  its  formation  of  nostalgia  as  a  tension  between  the  local  and  the  global  

is  that  it  shows  how  consumption,  in  some  ways,  does  aid  in  creating  genuine  ties  to  

tradition.    Persistent  self-­‐orientalization  and  modes  of  nostalgia  encourage  the  

consumption  of  products  to  create  physical  ties  to  tradition,  and  while  the  danger  of  

this  is  apparent  in  promoting  a  sanitized  and  ultimately  false  vision  of  the  illusory  

past,  Shinkai  still  seems  to  pose  the  following  question:  what  is  history  or  the  

passage  of  time  at  all?  

 Throughout  his  film,  the  concept  of  time  is  malleable:  it  ravels  and  unravels  

like  the  cords  that  Mitsuha  weaves,  and  it  is  something  that  can  be  manipulated.  One  

can  go  back  in  time  and  change  the  course  of  devastating  historical  events.  The  

question  is  posed  in  the  narrative,  whether  the  historical  past  in  which  Itomori  is  

devastated  by  the  meteor  impact  is  any  less  legitimate  or  true  than  one  in  which  

Itomori  is  spared.  Of  course,  there  is  no  conclusive  answer  that  is  provided;  

however,  Shinkai  gestures  towards  the  redemptive  potential  of  two  disparate  

sociocultural  entities  (symbolized  by  Taki  and  Mitsuha)  who  are  able  to  engage  in  

genuine  empathy  with  one  another  through  the  complex  imaginings  of  each  other’s  

lives.  Through  these  empathetic  processes,  both  the  global  and  local  can  be  spared.      

Whether  it  is  possible  for  two  disparate  entities  to  engage  in  genuine  

empathy  for  the  other  remains  questionable  beyond  the  scope  of  the  film.  For  

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example,  Taki  and  MItsuha  have  been  privileged  (or  cursed)  to  experience  one  

another’s  lives  in  a  very  direct  and  literal  manner.  Taki,  in  particular,  is  able  to  use  

the  cord  that  Mitsuha  made  in  order  to  engage  very  explicitly  and  intimately  with  

her  history  from  birth  to  death.  Through  this  experience,  he  is  able  to  engage  with  

not  only  Mitsuha’s  personal  history,  but  also  all  that  she  comes  to  represent  in  the  

film,  in  regards  to  the  traditional.  Mitsuha  and  her  cord  acts  as  an  umbilical  cord  to  a  

historical  past  that  Taki  would  otherwise  have  never  been  able  to  experience.  

Likewise,  Mitsuha  is  able  to  also  exist  with  the  embodied  knowledge  of  experiencing  

modernity  through  Taki’s  life,  but  she  no  longer  sees  his  life  from  the  fetishistic  and  

essentializing  perspective  of  just  wanting  to  become  “a  handsome  boy  in  Tokyo.”  

Through  her  experiences,  she  learns  to  view  another  entity  in  a  deeply  empathetic  

manner,  despite  the  fact  that  he  exists  as  her  diametric  opposite.      

 In  the  end,  both  Taki  and  Mitsuha  are  doomed  to  forget  the  names  of  the  

other  who  affected  them  so  greatly  in  their  youth  and  with  whom  they  exchanged  

the  gifts  of  both  modernity  and  tradition,  which  reveals  a  somewhat  fatalistic  tone  

for  those  who  are  able  to  foster  empathy  with  one  another,  regardless  of  processes  

of  self-­‐orientalization  or  westernization.  Yet  Shinkai  also  shows  how  the  ones  who  

are  able  to  change  the  course  of  devastating  historical  events  are  the  individuals  

who  have  successfully  consumed  both  global  modernities  and  the  artificially  

constructed  traditional  pasts  alike,  and  learned  by  mediating  them  both  within  the  

self.  If  physical  and  metaphysical  consumption  aids  in  this  mediation,  Shinkai  seems  

to  support  it,  as  we  see  examples  in  which  Taki  engages  with  traditions  by  drinking  

Mitsuha’s  kuchikamizake  or  Mitsuha  engages  with  “modernity”  by  consuming  

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Western  sweets.  Before  engaging  more  deeply  with  the  role  of  consumption  in  

regards  to  mediating  nostalgia  in  the  film,  I  will  first  illustrate  the  significance  of  

Mitsuha’s  cord  weaving  practices  as  a  mode  of  connecting  to  the  past  and  the  

flashback  scenes  in  which  Taki  engages  directly  with  Mitsuha’s  personal  history.    

After  Taki  comes  to  the  realization  that  the  town  of  Itomori  no  longer  exists,  

due  to  the  devastation  of  the  Tiamet  comet,  he  goes  to  the  shrine  that  is  up  in  the  

Hida  Mountains  in  order  to  look  for  clues  to  the  mystery  of  his  body-­‐swapping  

experience.  Inside  the  shrine,  he  finds  the  kuchikamizake  that  Mitsuha  has  offered  to  

the  Miyamizu  god  and  proceeds  to  drink  it,  stating  that  the  wine  itself  is  “half  of  

Mitsuha.”  When  he  drinks  it,  he  is  plunged  into  a  series  of  flashbacks  from  Mitsuha’s  

timeline  in  which  the  red  cord  that  Mitsuha  wove  for  him  becomes  a  guiding  tether  

in  which  to  navigate  Mitsuha’s  past  from  birth  to  death.  Reflective  of  Mitsuha’s  

status  as  a  symbol  of  Japan’s  past,  the  first  image  we  see  is  an  abstraction  of  the  

Tiamet  Comet  hurling  towards  Japan,  only  for  it  to  be  transformed  to  become  the  

fetus  of  Mitsuha.  The  cord,  which  helps  keep  Taki  tethered  to  his  own  time,  is  also  

transformed  to  represent  an  umbilical  cord,  connecting  Mitsuha  to  her  mother.    This  

emphasis  on  the  female  figure  as  a  conduit  for  history  and  tradition  extends  towards  

Mitsuha’s  mother  as  well.  Mitsuha’s  mother  was  the  figure  that  kept  her  father  

connected  to  Itomori’s  traditional  past,  yet  after  Mitsuha’s  mother  passes  away,  we  

see  Mitsuha’s  father  (the  mayor  of  Itomori)  abandon  Miyamizu  Shrine,  and  with  it,  

tradition.  Without  a  female  figure  being  a  constant  physical  manifestation  of  

tradition,  modernity  (which  is  once  again  represented  by  the  male  figure  of  

Mitsuha’s  father)  becomes  detached,  creating  grief  for  future  generations,  as  

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represented  by  Mitsuha  weeping  as  a  child.  Mitsuha’s  father  creates  a  convenient  

foil  for  Taki’s  character  in  this  scene:  for  whereas  we  see  that  Taki’s  father  abandons  

what  he  perceives  to  be  backwards  traditions  after  the  trauma  of  losing  his  wife,  

Taki  runs  towards  Itomori,  the  shrine,  and  consequently,  tradition,  to  try  to  

understand  and  save  Mitsuha.  Later,  we  see  that  it  is  Mitsuha’s  father’s  adamant  

refusal  to  engage  with  the  knowledge  that  is  gained  through  the  occult  body  

swapping  (the  prediction  of  the  comet),  that  hinders  the  saving  of  Itomori.  The  fluid  

symbol  of  the  comet,  turned  cord,  turned  umbilical  cord  in  this  scene,  represents  a  

physical  means  by  which  Taki  can  return  to  and  accept  the  originary  narrative  of  

Mitsuha’s  life.  With  the  cord,  he  is  able  to  reconnect  with  tradition.  Within  this  

beautifully  animated  series  of  scenes,  in  order  to  construct  a  better  future  for  

Mitsuha,  one  in  which  she  survives,  Taki  drinks  the  kuchikamizake  that  Mitsuha  

made  in  the  past,  effectively  consuming  tradition  and  thus  becoming  immersed  in  

her  timeline.  By  consuming  the  past,  he  is  able  to  get  another  chance  at  changing  the  

future.  Through  the  act  of  consumption,  he  is  able  to  connect  with  the  pieces  of  the  

tradition  that  Mitsuha  embodies  and  is  able  to,  quite  literally,  save  her  life.    

 

Figure  7.  Screenshot  of  Mitsuha  and  Taki  trying  to  find  one  another,  connected  by  Mitsuha’s  cord.  

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As  stated  before,  Mitsuha  is  a  figure  that  symbolizes  a  historical  past,  both  in  

the  personal  sense  for  Taki,  but  also  to  the  larger  public,  as  she  is  representative  of  

tradition  in  the  historical  town  that  she  lives  in.  She  reflects  these  traditions  through  

her  practices  and  responsibilities  for  the  Miyamizu  Shrine.  She  is  the  diametric  

opposite  of  the  jaded  urbanite,  and  in  her  ability  to  enact  change  through  vague  

occult  means  (as  she  is  the  one  who  seems  to  have  initiated  the  body-­‐swapping  by  

her  wish  to  the  gods),  she  also  becomes  a  figure  of  the  pre-­‐modern  aural  tradition.  It  

is  significant  that  all  of  the  written,  alphabetic  data  both  on  Taki’s  cellphone,  as  well  

as  the  names  and  messages  that  they  write  on  each  other’s  hands,  are  not  enough  to  

trigger  remembrance  of  and  relationship  to  the  past.  It  is  not  until  Taki  meets  the  

grown  Mitsuha  at  the  end  of  the  film  and  asks  for  her  name  orally  that  we  can  

assume  that  a  legitimate  transition  from  being  subjected  to  an  imaginary  past  that  

cannot  be  recalled  to  a  more  hopeful  present  and  future  has  occurred.  Throughout  

the  film,  we  see  how  the  written  word  is  not  enough  to  trigger  a  relationship  to  the  

past,  and  in  fact,  it  is  Mitsuha’s  practice  of  making  cords,  of  making  kuchikamizake,  

and  of  recounting  tales  of  the  past  verbally,  like  the  one  of  her  grandmother  

reminding  her  of  the  Great  Fire  of  Mayugoro  engages  with  the  past  meaningfully.  It  

is  significant  that  that  the  consumption  of  the  kuchikamizake,  which  means  mouth-­‐

chewing  sake,  is  the  medium  by  which  Taki  is  able  to  engage  with  Mitsuha’s  own  

past,  and  not  a  literary  platform,  such  as  a  diary.  This  once  again  places  Mitsuha  in  

the  position  of  the  pre-­‐modern  and  the  aural.  Taki’s  active  consumption,  both  in  the  

physical  and  metaphysical  act,  triggers  these  historical  epiphanies  about  the  self  and  

for  brief  moments,  allows  the  temporal  and  spatial  displacement  between  himself  

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and  Mitsuha  to  be  closed  ever  so  slightly.    This  act  of  consumption  would  and  should  

immediately  seem  suspect  to  those  who  are  critical  of  capitalism  as  a  means  of  

convincing  those  who  are  longing  for  the  past  to  find  a  semblance  of  it  through  

consuming  products.  Yet  in  this  case,  Taki’s  engaging  with  Mitsuha’s  kuchikamizake  

and  tying  her  cord  around  his  wrist  seems  divorced  from  the  capitalistic  

disillusionment  of  most  acts  of  commodity  consumption.  At  one  point  in  the  film,  

Mitsuha’s  little  sister  jokes  that  they  should  sell  kuchikamizake  on  the  market,  strike  

it  rich,  and  use  the  money  to  go  to  Tokyo.  By  gesturing  towards  the  possibility  of  

commodifying  this  tradition,  Shinkai  seems  well  aware  of  the  role  of  the  market  in  

solidifying  nostalgic  resonances,  and  suggest  the  possibility  of  cheapening  the  sake  

that  has  become  “half  of  Mitsuha,”  by  tainting  it  with  capitalist  motivations.          

By  engaging  with  historical  artifacts,  individuals  are  able  to  indulge  in  what  

Arjun  Appadurai  has  called  “ersatz  nostalgia.”  This  is  defined  as  a  kind  of  ”nostalgia  

without  lived  experience  or  collective  historical  memory”  (Appadurai  78).  In  short,  

it  is  a  kind  of  fictional  nostalgia,  in  which  “transience  itself  is  commodified  in  

passing”  (Boym  38).  Market  consumption  is  the  mode  in  which  ersatz  nostalgia  

thrives,  and  it  is  largely  a  manufactured  condition  that  encourages  universalized  

souvenirs  not  only  from  other  nations  but  from  one’s  own  nation  as  well.  The  same  

is  applicable  to  cultural  and  artistic  narratives  that  seek  to  construct  this  sense  of  

nostalgia.    In  order  to  feed  the  need  for  an  ersatz  nostalgia,  one  creates  “ersatz”  

sacred  spaces  through  popular  culture  narratives,  tours  framed  to  emphasize  a  

certain  cultural  ethos,  creating  ideologies  like  wakon  yosai  (Japanese  spirit,  western  

techniques)  or  constant  relocalization.  Anime  is  particularly  interesting  from  this  

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perspective,  because  it  is  doubly  illusory,  simply  in  the  fact  that  it  is  illustrated.  

Anime  does  not  even  begin  to  convince  the  viewer  that  this  could  be  a  situation  or  

place  grounded  in  reality  with  “real”  human  actants  and  “real”  places.  It  is  

abstracted  human  forms  and  abstracted  places,  and  anime  films  (Kimi  no  na  wa  

included)  show  no  desire  to  hide  their  artifice.  Despite  Shinkai’s  incredibly  detailed  

approach  to  animation,  it  can  never  shed  its  “falseness,”  or  its  simulacrum-­‐like  

context.  Nor  do  anime  creators  seem  to  desire  that  to  even  happen.    The  narratives  

that  come  from  anime,  particularly  for  stories  like  Kimi  no  na  wa,  which  contains  

heavy  strains  of  the  iyashikei  (healing,  soothing)  genre  mentioned  in  the  last  

chapter,  are  culturally  and  materially  mediated,  and  unapologetically  so.  Yet  

perhaps  in  the  drive  to  search  for  these  sacred  spaces  that  have  the  ability  to  

embody  and  contain  an  all-­‐encompassing  ersatz  nostalgia,  viewers  and  consumers  

have  no  choice  but  to  turn  to  the  fictional  spaces  and  times  in  the  form  of  anime.  

Animation  remains  one  of  the  very  few  mediums  that  can  portray  the  reality  of  

nonlinear  time  in  a  convincing  manner,  and  is  able  to  maintain  a  restorative  

nostalgia  without  having  to  necessarily  deal  with  the  physical  deterioration  of  

passing  time  at  all.  It  is  artificial  and  fictional,  certainly,  but  not  necessarily  

unrealistic.  Nostalgia  for  the  imaginary  past  places  most  viewers  of  the  film  in  the  

same  position  as  Taki:  one  who  continues  to  search  for  an  elusive  something  or  

someone  to  complete  a  sense  of  cohesive  identity.  In  this  sense,  our  ability  to  relate  

to  Taki  and  Mitsuha,  as  figures  constantly  struggling  with  the  tensions  of  modernity  

and  tradition,  is  incredibly  convincing  regarding  the  narrative  of  the  national  self  for  

Japanese  viewers,  regardless  of  its  fictionality.  Scholar  Thomas  Pavel  states  that  “the  

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space  of  myths  are  distant,  even  inaccessible,  but  at  the  same  time  so  familiarly  true,  

so  eminently  visible”  (Pavel  86).  His  observations  on  the  fictional  realm  and  the  

porous  boundaries  of  myth-­‐like  narratives  seem  remarkably  relevant  to  the  role  of  

nostalgia  and  fictionality  in  the  formation  and  representation  of  national  

Japaneseness  in  Kimi  no  na  wa.        

3.2  Fictional  Landscapes,  Journeys,  and  the  Significance  of  Doing      

The  journey  that  the  viewer  takes  with  Taki,  both  in  the  form  of  his  

pilgrimage  back  to  the  altar  of  Miyamizu’s  god,  as  well  as  his  metaphorical  journey  

through  Mitsuha’s  past  by  connecting  with  the  materiality  of  the  cord  and  the  wine,  

is  reminiscent  of  the  manner  in  which  postmodern  individuals  today  engage  with  

their  historical  past.  This  relationship  between  consumption  as  mode  of  connecting  

and  relating  to  the  imaginary  past  informs  many  industries  in  postwar  Japan,  of  

which  anime  is  merely  one  example.  In  her  Discourses  of  the  Vanishing:  Modernity,  

Phantasm,  and  Japan,  Marilyn  Ivy  recounts  how  the  tourism  advertising  agency  in  

the  1970s  encouraged  and  framed  national  travel  as  a  mode  of  departure  from  a  

“home.”  Through  these  travels,  the  wanderer  is  encouraged  to  find  an  essential  lack  

in  his  or  her  cultural  identity  and,  consequently,  is  stirred  to  want  to  rediscover  the  

“true  Japanese  self”  by  “(re)  discovering  its  authenticity  by  moving  through  

originary  landscapes”  (Ivy  41).  At  its  heart,  this  movement  was  about  creating  a  

consumable  version  of  the  authentic  national  self,  a  materialistic  sense  of  

relocalization  that  cannot  escape  from  global  advanced  capitalistic  trends,  but  

makes  the  separation  between  modernity  and  tradition  bearable.  Skeptics  would  

see  these  trends  and  gestures  towards  advertisers  as  insidious  manipulators  of  the  

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public;  however,  there  is  something  to  be  said  for  the  benefits  of  the  physical  

practice  of  passing  through  landscapes  and  going  on  pilgrimages  to  find  the  

authentic  self,  albeit  one  that  is  partially  manipulated  by  capitalistic  desire.  

 Like  the  grandmother  in  the  film  says,  there  is  something  to  be  said  for  going  

through  the  motions  of  tradition,  regardless  of  whether  the  originary  meaning  of  

these  practices  have  remained  intact  or  not.  The  tradition  of  traveling/wandering  or  

tabi  existed  before  the  Tokugawa  period,  when  religious  figures  practiced  going  on  

pilgrimages  as  religious  practice  (Ivy  32).  The  marginalized  in  society  (eg.  peddlers,  

beggars,  artists)  also  practiced  tabi,  though  it  seems  rarely  by  choice.  Wandering  

became  an  existential  condition  for  those  who  lived  outside  mainstream  society,  and  

these  marginalized  groups  used  their  wandering  to  create  folkloric  art  (Ivy  37).  In  

this  sense,  even  the  practice  of  tabi  in  the  modern  day  seems  at  least  superficially  

connected,  dealing  with  the  existential  conditions  of  finding  the  “authentic  national  

self.”  In  the  recursive  doing  of  the  practice,  there  may  be  an  opportunity  for  modern-­‐  

day  Japanese  people  to  find  a  sense  of  connection  to  a  lost  past,  powered  by  the  

ever-­‐present  strains  of  reflective  and  restorative  nostalgia.  Within  the  Shinkai  

Makoto’s  film,  it  is  inferred  that  there  have  been  people  before  Taki  who  have  

pilgrimaged  to  Itomori  and  to  the  Hida  Mountains,  in  order  to  discover  the  nostalgic  

past.  One  point  of  the  film  shows  Taki  and  his  friend,  Okudera  going  to  a  photo  

exhibition,  aptly  named  “Nostalgia.”  The  exhibition  consists  of  photographs  of  

Itomori  and  the  surrounding  Hida  Mountains.  In  a  deeply  introspective  moment,  as  

Taki  is  looking  at  these  photographs,  the  viewer  only  sees  a  slow  panning  close-­‐up  

to  Taki’s  face,  as  he  realizes  that  other  people  have  travelled,  discovered,  and  

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documented  this  nostalgia-­‐laden  location.  Seeing  this  exhibition  and  the  fact  that  the  

mysterious  body-­‐swapping  incidents  have  suddenly  stopped  prompt  him  to  once  

again,  travel  to  Itomori  on  his  own  accord,  with  his  own  body.  Through  this  

pilgrimage,  he  has  an  epiphany  that  Itomori  has  been  entirely  destroyed  by  the  

impact  of  the  Tiamet  comet.  Without  his  travels,  he  would  not  have  been  able  to  

come  to  this  realization.    

In  an  interview,  Toni  Morrison  recounts  the  importance  of  ritual  and  of  

repetitive  doing,  in  order  to  go  through  the  steps  of  “preparation  to  enter  a  space  

that  I  [Toni  Morrison]  can  only  call  nonsecular”  (Interview  by  Elissa  Schappell,  Toni  

Morisson).  She  outlines  her  daily  ritual  to  prepare  to  write  by  saying  that  in  order  to  

get  into  the  ideal  state,    

 “I  always  get  up  and  make  a  coffee  while  it  is  still  dark  –it  must  be  dark-­‐   and   then   I   drink   the   coffee   and  watch   the   light   come   on…  writers  all  devise  ways  to  approach  that  place  where  they  expect  to  make  the  contact,  where  they  become  the  conduit,  or  when  they  engage  in  this  mysterious  process”  (Morrison  1993).      

By  the  physical  act  of  doing  this  ritual,  she  becomes  a  kind  of  conduit  for  the  

inspiration  that  drove  her  writings.  Haruki  Murakami  echoes  similar  sentiments  

about  the  importance  of  repetitive  physical  rituals  in  order  to  reach  a  state  of  

mesmerism,  where  he  could  engage  in  a  “deeper  state  of  mind”  (interview  by  John  

Wray  with  Haruki  Murakami).  He  outlines  his  own  ritual  process,  saying,    

“When   I’m   in  writing  mode   for   a  novel,   I   get  up  at   four   a.m.   and  work  for  five  to  six  hours.  In  the  afternoon,  I  run  for  ten  kilometers  or  swim  for  fifteen  hundred  meters  (or  do  both),  then  I  read  a  bit  and   listen   to   some  music.   I   go   to   bed   at   nine   p.m.   I   keep   to   this  routine  every  day  without  variation.  The  repetition  itself  becomes  

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the  important  thing;  it  is  a  form  of  mesmerism.  I  mesmerize  myself  to  reach  a  deeper  state  of  mind”  (Murakami  2004).      

While  both  authors  refer  to  this  process  in  order  to  mediate  their  creative  

processes  of  writing,  similar  observations  could  be  made  for  the  practice  of  folkloric  

traditions,  though  instead  of  becoming  a  conduit  for  a  literary  muse,  one  becomes  a  

conduit  for  the  historic  past.  Whether  this  historical  narrative  is  imaginary  or  not  

does  not  seem  particularly  relevant,  in  that  one  can  argue  that  all  history  is  only  

manifested  through  historical  retelling  and  these  retellings  are  narrated  by  voices  of  

those  in  power.  Instead,  it  is  significant  that  practice  opens  the  door  for  a  feeling  of  

relating  back  to  originary  narratives.    

In  the  film,  one  of  the  most  significant  traditional  practices  that  Mitsuha  

engages  in  regularly  is  the  weaving  of  cords  with  thread.  The  cord  symbolizes  Taki  

and  Mitsuha’s  relationship  between  present,  future,  and  past:  the  raveling  and  

unraveling  of  time  and  history.  By  continuously  weaving  the  threads  as  a  regular  

practice,  Mitsuha  enters  a  state  of  mind  not  unlike  the  kind  of  “unsecular”  

mesmerism  that  both  Murakami  and  Morrison  delineate.  In  that  state  of  mind,  she  

becomes  a  conduit  for  her  traditional  past-­‐self  to  connect  with  her  modern  present  

self.  The  symbolic  significance  of  the  thread  comes  from  its  ability  to  connect  the  

modern,  as  symbolized  by  the  male  character,  Taki,  and  the  pre-­‐modern,  symbolized  

by  the  female  character,  Mitsuha,  together.  By  following  her  threads,  Taki  is  able  to  

rediscover  an  imaginary  historical  past  through  Mitsuha.    

In  a  similar  sense,  the  physical  act  of  traveling  from  place  to  place,  and  

becoming  a  conduit  for  these  places  to  pass  through  a  traveller,  may  create  similar  

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sites  of  connection  between  past  and  present,  regardless  of  the  capitalist  

motivations  of  tourism  agencies.  The  psychological  facets  of  the  “Discover  Japan12”  

tourism  movements,  as  outlined  by  Ivy,  seem  deeply  connected  to  Shinkai  Makoto’s  

stylistic  approach  to  filmmaking.  Shinkai  Makoto  is  known  for  his  incorporation  of  

detailed  and  luscious  background  scenes,  which  sweep  across  the  screen  and  seek  to  

awe  his  viewers  through  accurate  depictions  of  scenic  “reality,”  juxtaposed  with  

well-­‐researched  imaginary  landscapes  of  imaginary  towns  like  Itomori.  In  many  

senses  of  the  word,  and  particularly  in  the  case  of  Kimi  No  Na  Wa,  Shinkai  seeks  to  

take  his  viewers  on  a  virtual  “pilgrimage,”  not  unlike  those  advertised  in  the  1970s  

by  tourism  agencies.  He  oscillates  between  the  frenetic  urban  sprawl  of  Tokyo  -­‐-­‐  and  

the  relative  calm  and  ultimately  ephemeral  existence  of  the  imaginary  Itomori  and  

the  Hida  mountains  that  surround  the  small  town.  The  imaginary  non-­‐existence  of  

Itomori  is  also  significant,  both  in  the  sense  that  this  film  is  a  work  of  fiction,  as  well  

as  Taki’s  own  sense  of  the  town’s  elusive  ephemerality  as  he  goes  on  his  own  kind  of  

journey  to  rediscover  it.  The  way  in  which  Itomori  disappears,  quite  literally  after  

the  devastation  of  the  Tiamet  comet,  creates  a  poignant  allegory  of  the  national  

struggle  to  reconnect  with  past  imaginary  roots.  As  one  tries  to  engage  with  the  

historical  past,  there  is  no  immutable  essence  that  keeps  it  from  changing.  The  

irretrievable  past  seeks  to  alter  itself  as  soon  as  one  makes  contact,  making  it  

impossible  truly  to  connect  with  it.  Nevertheless,  in  the  end,  by  drinking  Mitsuha’s                                                                                                                  12  The  “Discover  Japan”  movement  was  a  campaign  started  by  the  Japanese  National  Railway  company  in  the  1970s,  which  promoted  internal  travel,  focusing  on  individualized  micro-­‐narratives  that  revolved  around  rediscovery  of  obscure  and  less-­‐known  areas  of  Japan  (Ivy  34).  These  spaces  would  come  to  signify  a  more  “authentic”  and  personal  vision  of  Japan.  This  advertising  campaign  became  the  most  successful  in  Japanese  history  (Ivy  34).    

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wine  and  using  the  cord  as  a  means  of  reversing  time,  he  is  able  to  get  a  second  

chance  at  rewriting  a  history  in  which  tradition  can  be  preserved.    

 

Figure  8.  A  screenshot  of  the  location  of  the  Miyamizu  spiritual  altar  and  an  example  of  Shinkai’s  work  with  scenery.  

 Through  the  viewing  and  consequent  consumption  of  Taki’s  sacred  virtual  

pilgrimage,  viewers  are  able  to  experience  a  similar  kind  of  connection  with  a  

nostalgic  imaginary  past  that  can  lead  to  a  reconstruction  of  an  authentic  cultural  

identity,  by  sharing  this  common  narrative  with  other  community  members.  The  

uncanny  realism  that  is  shown  throughout  the  film,  in  regards  to  its  background  and  

Shinkai’s  ability  to  make  familiar  the  imaginary,  makes  Kimi  no  na  wa  a  remarkably  

effective  film  in  mediating  fictional,  but  not  necessarily  unreal  narratives,  mythos,  

and  topographies  into  the  grand  narrative13  of  one’s  national  identity.  At  various  

                                                                                                               13  This  was  a  term  coined  by  Jean-­‐Francois  Lyotard  in  his  work,  The  Postmodern  Condition:  A  report  on  Knowledge.  The  grand  narrative  is  a  comprehensive  metadiscourse  which  when  allows  people  to  gain  a  sense  of  validity  and  legitimation  when  grappling  with  ideas  of  meaning-­‐making,  identity,  different  forms  of  

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points  in  the  film,  Mitsuha’s  grandmother  witnesses  Taki’s  internal  self,  even  though  

he  appears  to  be  Mitsuha  externally.  During  these  times,  the  grandmother  says,  “Oh,  

you  are  not  Mitsuha,  right?...I  also  remember  seeing  strange  dreams  when  I  was  a  

young  girl…Treasure  the  experience.  Dreams  fade  away  after  you  wake  up.”  This  

dialogue  suggests  that  that  this  curious  phenomenon  of  body-­‐swapping,  and  

consequent  forgetting  of  memories  established  when  in  interaction  with  another’s  

life,  is  an  experience  that  is  passed  down  a  familial  line.  Yet,  even  as  dreams  imply  a  

kind  of  un-­‐reality,  Taki  immediately  sees  the  broader  implications  of  this  level  of  

engagement  with  these  dreamlike  experiences.  He  states  that  perhaps  these  

experiences  of  pseudo-­‐reality  all  gesture  towards  the  prediction  of  the  cataclysmic  

Tiamet  Comet  incident,  and  through  these  experiences,  he  can  try  to  stop  the  

tragedy  and  create  alternative  histories  through  the  knowledge  that  he  has  gained  

from  dreams.  Within  this  dialogue  between  the  grandmother  and  Taki,  via  Mitsuha,  

Shinkai  makes  a  powerful  case  for  the  telling  and  retelling  of  historical  memory  

through  fiction.  Through  the  making  and  de-­‐making  of  historical  threads,  the  

fictional  and  the  pseudo-­‐real  becomes  a  means  of  feeding  back  into  the  reality  of  the  

external  world.  While  the  relationship  that  Mitsuha  and  Taki  share  -­‐-­‐exchanging  

modernity  and  tradition  simultaneously  with  one  another  -­‐-­‐  seems  to  exist  within  

the  realm  of  dreams,  they  nevertheless  have  great  impact  on  the  timeline  of  the  

external  world  as  well.  The  existence  of  multiple  layers  of  the  present  is  reflected  in    

the  fact  that  both  Taki  and  Mitsuha  live  in  each  other’s  lives  thinking  that  they  are  

on  the  same  timeline,  even  though  Taki  exists  in  a  time  that  is  three  years  in  the                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            knowledge,  justice  and  truth  (Lyotard  XXIII).    Examples  of  such  metanarratives  may  include  originary  myths,  religious  narratives,  and  legends.  

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future  of  Mitsuha’s  time.  The  multiplicity  of  presents  also  reveals  how  despite  the  

fact  that  there  is  a  constant  exploration  of  the  traditional  and  the  modern,  the  

historical  past  and  the  uncertain  future  -­‐-­‐  Kimi  no  na  wa  follows  approaches  

stylistically  similar  ground  as  Shinkai’s  earlier  works  with  regards  to  time.  Gavin  

Walker  states  that  in  Shinkai’s  earlier  works,  such  as  The  Place  Promised  in  Our  Early  

Days,  instead  of  a  separation  between  past  and  future,  there  is  truly  only  an  “  

‘eternal  now’  that  is  stretched,  elongated,  and  retracted  through  its  imbrication  with  

other  parallel  presents”  (Walker  11).  

3.3  Necessary  Modernity  and  Fluid  Semiotics  

When  Taki  leaves  Tokyo,  a  city  perhaps  most  representative  of  a  hybridized,  

“Westernized”  nature,  he  goes  to  look  for  Itomori,  only  to  find  that  it  has  been  

devastated  by  the  falling  Comet  Tiamet.  The  only  thing  that  remains  is  a  giant  crater  

made  by  the  impact  of  the  meteor.  During  this  journey,  Taki  has  the  epiphany  that  

Mitsuha  was  living  three  years  in  the  past  and  that  the  evening  that  Comet  Tiamet  

fell  was  the  day  Mitsuha  passed  away.    Soon  after,  he  tries  to  research  the  

mysterious  relationship  between  himself  and  Mitsuha,  only  to  find  that  all  traces  of  

their  history  together,  as  well  as  his  own  wavering  memory,  has  become  lost.  

Towards  the  end  of  the  movie,  we  see  Taki  as  a  full-­‐fledged  adult,  and  he  has  lost  the  

ability  to  recall  Mitsuha’s  name  and  his  body-­‐swapping  experience.  He  remembers  

only  that  at  one  point  in  his  life  in  high  school,  he  was  illogically  obsessed  with  the  

town  of  Itomori  and  the  traumatic  encounter  with  the  comet  that  devastated  the  

historical  town.  While  we  see  him  continue  to  go  through  the  motions  of  his  daily  

life  in  a  manner  that  constitutes  well-­‐adjusted  adulthood,  we  nevertheless  are  able  

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to  observe  that  he  feels  like  he  has  lost  something  incredibly  precious  and  integral  

to  his  selfhood.  In  an  inner  monologue,  he  states  at  the  end,  “I  always  feel  like  I’ve  

been  searching  for  something,  for  someone.”    

While  these  disparate  experiences  of  both  Taki  and  Mitsuha  result  in  all  

kinds  of  amusing  hijinks,  the  unstable  and  fluctuating  nature  of  identity  continues  to  

mediate  the  lives  of  these  two  characters,  as  their  senses  of  selfhood  continuously  

becomes  more  and  more  bound  to  one  another.  The  relationship  that  Mitsuha  and  

Taki  share  with  one  another  is  not  unlike  an  allegory  for  the  modern  Japanese  

identity:  a  blending  of  contradictions  and  diametric  opposites,  which  nevertheless  

configures  itself  into  an  unstable  and  self-­‐defining  whole.  The  issue  of  personal  

identity,  and  its  relationship  with  larger  sociocultural  and  national  frameworks  

continues  to  be  a  recursive  theme  throughout  the  narrative.  Temporal  dissonance  

and  displacement  in  the  subject’s  understanding  of  history,  and  the  unraveling  of  

both  time  and  historical  narrative  make  both  Mitsuha  and  Taki  uniformly  liminal  

figures  -­‐-­‐primarily  because  they  explicitly  lived  through  the  experience  of  temporal  

disruptions  -­‐-­‐  not  simply  as  an  abstract  concept,  but  as  experiential  truths.    

While  Shinkai  places  great  value  on  the  precarious  nature  of  one’s  

relationship  to  nostalgia  and  tradition,  he  does  not  discount  the  necessity  of  

modernity,  as  seen  in  the  critical  role  that  Taki  plays  in  rewriting  a  future  in  which  

Mitsuha  and  her  village  can  survive.  Though  Taki’s  experience  of  living  through  

Mitsuha’s  life  and  engaging  with  the  traditions  of  Itomori  has  enriched  his  cultural  

experience,  and  has  allowed  him  to  recognize  that  part  of  the  nostalgic  longing  that  

has  plagued  him  comes  from  absence  of  engagement  with  tradition,  there  is  no  dire  

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sense  that  he  would  not  be  able  to  survive  at  all  without  his  experiences  of  Mitsuha’s  

lifestyle.  This  sense  lies  in  contrast  to  Mitsuha,  who  would  be  killed  without  the  

knowledge  that  modernity  (in  the  form  of  Taki)  brings  from  the  future.  Shinkai  

suggests  that  modernity  is  necessary  to  sustain  tradition,  even  as  interaction  with  

tradition  may  be  necessary  to  sustain  a  complete  Japanese  cultural  identity.    

Likewise,  near  the  end  of  the  film,  when  Taki  (who  currently  resides  in  

Mitsuha’s  body)  tries  to  move  the  inhabitants  of  Itomori  to  a  safer  area,  he  must  

interact  with  modern  technology,  such  as  the  citywide  intercom,  to  engage  with  the  

citizens.  On  the  one  hand,  we  see  how  technology  fails  to  aid  us  directly  in  the  

preservation  of  Taki’s  traditional  self,  as  exemplified  by  the  cellphone  memos  which  

glitch  and  disappear.    However,  in  seeking  to  preserve  a  tradition  in  which  

materiality  can  sustain  a  variety  of  meanings,  as  shown  by  the  significance  of  cord  

weaving  in  Itomori,  modernity  can  preserve  and  be  subsumed  into  the  

precariousness  of  meaning  behind  the  action  and  materiality  of  traditional  practices.  

Tradition  and  modernity  become  less  dichotomous,  and  instead  feed  into  one  

another  to  create  new  meanings.  As  Taki  and  Mitsuha’s  relationship  shows,  tradition  

and  modernity  must  sustain  one  another  in  order  to  define  a  cohesive  identity  that  

does  not  feel  the  inherent  lack  of  “something  or  someone.”  Kimi  no  na  wa  gives  an  

optimistic  view  that  while  ever-­‐changing  in  meaning  and  significance,  native  

tradition  is  more  resilient  than  is  often  represented  in  the  face  of  Western  

hegemonic  presence.  Even  within  modern  spaces  that  are  rife  with  Italian  

restaurants  and  Western  style  cafes,  the  urbane  masses  can  help  to  sustain  and  be  

sustained  by  more  rural  spaces,  where  inhabitants  make  kuchikamizake  and  make  

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pilgrimages  to  local  shrines.  The  precariousness  of  boundaries  between  modernity  

and  tradition  becomes  the  zeitgeist  of  the  film’s  overarching  message  of  cultural  

identity  formation.  Even  as  we  see  Taki  grow  into  an  adult  and  go  into  the  job  

market  as  an  architect,  he  states  how  his  purpose  for  going  into  this  particular  field  

is  due  to  his  desire  to  rebuild  devastated  landscapes  and  cities.  He  makes  the  astute  

observation  that  even  Tokyo  may  be  destroyed  one  day,  either  by  natural  

phenomena  or  through  historical  conflict,  and  he  would  like  to  continue  to  sustain  

landscapes  that  can  “leave  heartwarming  memories.”    This  desire  to  sustain  memory  

and  history  stands  in  direct  opposition  to  the  fact  that  both  Taki  and  Mitsuha  cannot  

seem  to  retain  memories  of  one  another,  despite  the  enormous  impact  they  have  

had  on  one  another’s  lives.    

This  tension  reflects  the  ways  in  which  Shinkai  Makoto  utilizes  both  

reflective  nostalgia  and  restorative  nostalgia  in  his  films  to  alter  one’s  relationship  

to  the  past.  Like  Taki,  who  feels  the  simultaneous  loss  and  obsessive  drive  to  

preserve  memory  and  nostalgia  through  his  work,  Shinkai  also  uses  the  medium  of  

animation  and  fictional  landscapes  to  recreate  spaces  of  memory  and  nostalgia.  His  

work  is  a  brilliant  meta-­‐commentary  on  how  one  can  preserve  iterations  of  history  

through  the  creative  and  re-­‐creative  artistic  processes  of  making.  For  Taki,  he  tries  

to  recreate  and  restore  nostalgic  spaces  through  architecture  and  for  Mitsuha  it  is  

through  her  cord  braiding  and  her  traditional  dancing.  Certainly  for  Shinkai,  it  is  his  

engagement  with  animated  narratives  and  the  detailed  landscapes  that  he  portrays  

to  depict  different  kinds  of  journeys  and  identities.  While  it  may  be  impossible  to  

capture  the  essence  of  the  elusive  “authentic”  past  without  the  mediation  of  material  

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objects  and  fictional  narratives  and  spaces,  Shinkai  shows  that  there  are  inherent  

values  in  the  interaction  of  these  creative  processes,  since  objects  like  the  Mitsuha’s  

cord,  her  kuchikamizake  and  Taki’s  sketches  continue  to  be  objects  of  metonymic  

remembrance  of  the  other.  Nostalgic  desire  becomes  physically  existent  in  the  

external  world  through  these  objects,  and  provides  the  potential  for  direct  

interaction  with  an  otherwise  inexpressible  desire.  By  constantly  engaging  with  

these  objects  and  the  creation  of  them,  the  characters  demonstrate  the  possibility  of  

transforming  their  significances.  It  is  also  through  these  objects  that  Taki  is  also  able  

to  turn  back  time  and  rewrite  a  tragic  history  in  which  all  has  been  lost  for  Itomori.    

Similarly,  as  I  have  stated  in  the  first  chapter,  anime  is  often  a  contested  site  

of  cultural  representation,  because  the  materiality  of  the  medium  was  so  heavily  

inspired  by  Western  technologies  and  techniques.  Yet,  in  Kimi  no  na  wa,  Shinkai  

continues  to  explore  how  materials  can  retain  separate  and  almost  paradoxical  

meanings  simultaneously.  We  see  this  in  the  analysis  of  the  scene  in  which  Taki  uses  

Mitsuha’s  cord  to  see  into  her  past.  In  that  scene,  the  cord  successfully  transforms  

into  the  devastating  comet,  to  a  sperm  cell,  to  a  life-­‐giving  umbilical  cord,  to  a  lifeline  

that  connects  the  masculine  figure  to  the  female  Miyamizu  lineage.  In  this  case,  the  

masculine  figure  is  Taki,  but  similar  observations  can  also  be  related  back  to  

Mitsuha’s  father.  After  following  the  cord,  Taki  is  taken  back  to  a  place  in  time  

before  the  comet  has  fallen.  The  comet  represents  the  exterior  world  beyond  the  

intimacy  that  Taki  and  Mitsuha  have  sustained  by  sharing  one  another’s  identities.  It  

is  a  reminder  of  the  larger  world  outside  their  relationship,  which  threatens  to  

destroy  the  wholeness  of  their  collective  identities  that  they  find  in  on  another.  Yet,  

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in  this  scene,  even  the  comet  becomes  subsumed  into  the  symbol  of  the  cord,  and  

becomes  the  means  by  which  Mitsuha  and  Taki  finally  meet  one  another.  The  cord  is  

something  at  once  deeply  personal  and  intimate  to  Mitsuha  and  Taki,  but  

simultaneously  flexible  enough  to  take  in  the  exterior  world  and  its  influences  and  

allow  it  to  exist  within  the  contours  of  their  intimacy.    

The  fluidity  of  meaning  that  the  cord  takes  in  this  scene  can  also  be  applied  to  

the  material  basis  of  the  anime  genre  itself.  Despite  the  Western  origins  of  the  

material  and  technique,  and  the  wide  variety  of  narratives  that  anime  specializes  in  

-­‐-­‐  from  the  technological  spectacle  and  violence  of  mecha  to  the  more  introspective  

and  self-­‐healing  iyashikei-­‐-­‐  both  can  be  equally  representative  of  Japanese  cultural  

ideologies  and  national  identity-­‐related  tensions.  Even  if  the  influence  and  effects  of  

Western  cultural  hegemony,  as  exercised  in  the  animation  medium,  are  felt  and  

witnessed  in  anime,  this  does  not  mean  that  anime  can  only  be  representative  of  

Western  culture  or  Japanese  culture.    To  admit  that  Western  influences  are  at  play  

within  anime  does  not  mean  that  Japanese  identity  is  not  expressed  or  discounted,  

but  that,  like  Mitsuha’s  cord,  the  significance  and  meaning  of  the  medium  and  the  

object  can  be  fluid  and  withstand  contradiction  and  paradox  without  breaking  grand  

historical  narratives.  As  the  cord  leads  Taki  to  both  futures  in  which  Mitsuha  is  

saved  and  in  which  Mitsuha  is  killed  by  the  comet’s  impact,  the  fluidity  of  both  

cultural  memory  and  time  can  be  expressed  through  Shinkai’s  depictions  of  

imaginary  nostalgic  landscapes  and  his  exploration  of  the  porous  boundaries  

between  tradition  and  modernity,  through  the  body-­‐swapping  experiences  of  

Mitsuha  and  Taki.        

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3.4  Iyashikei,  Distance,  Melancholy,  and  Magic  Realism         As  we  saw  in  in  the  first  chapter,  the  creation  of  the  iyashikei  genre  was  

inspired  by  the  need  to  heal  or  soothe  the  psychologically  distressing  effects  of  

postwar  traumas.    This  ailment  eventually  transformed  from  postwar  trauma  to  the  

need  for  “a  break  from  all  of  the  other  affective  appeals  encountered  daily  in  

contemporary  Japanese  media”  (Roquet  88).  Essentially,  it  serves  as  a  means  of  

coping  with  the  confusion  and  the  liminal  nature  of  the  postmodern  contemporary.  

For  many  contemporary  works  of  iyashikei,  and  Kimi  no  na  wa  falls  under  this  

umbrella,  there  is  a  sense  of  melancholic  fatalism  within  the  narrative.  Unlike  the  

predecessor  of  the  iyashikei  genre,  Sazae-­‐san,  the  tone  and  mood  of  present-­‐day  

iyashikei  narratives  are  not  so  much  a  riling  cry  to  overcome  societal  issues  or  the  

tensions  of  contemporary  cultural  identity,  as  much  as  it  is  a  mechanism  that  helps  

in  allowing  the  viewers  to  quietly  accept  and  make  peace  with  the  existing  

paradigmatic  structures  that  govern  and  exert  psychological  violence  upon  them.    

  For  example,  in  Kimi  no  na  wa,  as  is  characteristic  with  many  of  Shinkai’s  

films,  there  is  a  deep  sense  of  melancholy  that  stems  from  the  temporal  and  

psychological  distance  that  cannot  be  traversed  between  the  characters.  Even  as  

they  try  to  preserve  the  memory  of  the  other  or  sustain  the  significance  of  what  the  

other  has  done  for  their  wellbeing  and  development,  they  keep  forgetting  the  other’s  

respective  name  and  face.  Only  briefly,  with  the  help  of  providence  and  Mitsuha’s  

cord,  are  they  able  to  meet  on  the  same  timeline  for  an  instant,  but  soon,  they  return  

to  each  other’s  respective  place  in  the  timeline  continuum,  and  are  suspended  there  

for  several  years.  While  melancholic  however,  Kimi  no  Na  Wa  is  neither  nihilistic,  

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nor  uniformly  pessimistic.  It  would  be  difficult  to  sustain  the  soothing  iyashikei  tone  

if  the  subject  matter  turned  altogether  hopeless.  At  the  very  end,  Taki  and  Mitsuha  

are  able  to  meet  on  a  outdoor  stairway  in  Tokyo,  both  older  and  more  dispirited  due  

to  the  constant  feeling  of  having  lost  something  fundamental  to  their  being.  It  is  

uncertain  whether  Taki  and  Mitsuha  will  recall  one  another,  or  even  if  they  do,  

whether  their  relationship  can  remain  intact  after  the  brunt  of  time  and  fleeting  

historical  memory.  However,  the  movie  ends  on  a  tempered  optimistic  note,  because  

they  are  finally  able  to  face  one  another  in  the  same  timeline,  with  the  temporal  

distance  closed.  The  ending  is  neither  entirely  optimistic  nor  pessimistic.  The  

psychological  conflict  borne  from  temporal  and  identity-­‐related  disjunctions  result  

in  both  characters  suffering  from  recurring  melancholia,  and  this  struggle  is  never  

resolved,  at  least  within  the  scope  of  the  canonical  film.  However,  in  addressing  the  

issue  and  providing  the  rather  hopeful  message  that  histories  and  memories  can  be  

reworked  and  redefined,  there  is  space  for  fulfillment.    

  The  rejection  on  the  part  of  Shinkai  to  resolve  these  complex  issues  neatly  is  

reflected  in  the  manner  in  which  he  uses  magic  realism  throughout  the  narrative.  

For  the  most  part,  the  narrative  consists  of  two  young  teenagers  learning  to  come  to  

terms  with  their  identities.  On  the  surface,  this  is  hardly  a  narrative  that  is  culturally  

specific  to  Japan  or  any  other  nation.  The  unique  quality  that  Shinkai  injects  into  this  

conventional  narrative  which  gestures  towards  perhaps  a  kind  of  cultural  

uniqueness  is  the  suspension  and  irresolution  that  comes  from  the  encounter  with  

the  occult  or  magical  realist  dimension  of  the  film.  In  this  particular  context,  it  is  

Mitsuha  and  Taki’s  body-­‐swapping  experience  and  the  consequent  time  leaping  that  

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results.    In  this  context,  I  will  use  the  term  magic  realism  as  defined  by  Matthew  

Strecher  in  his  essay  on  “Magical  Realism  and  the  Search  for  Identity  in  the  Fiction  

of  Murakami  Haruki.”  Strecher  sets  the  parameters  of  the  magical  realism  genre  as  

“a  realistic  narrative  setting  is  created,  then  disrupted,  sometimes  mildly,  

sometimes  violently  by  the  bizarre  or  the  magical”  (Strecher  267).  This  definition  

purposely  removes  the  often-­‐political  implications  of  involving  magic  realism  into  a  

narrative  as  an  allegory  of  external  invasion  into  local  lands,  and  seeks  to  

depoliticize  it.  While  political  implications  can  certainly  be  coded  into  the  narrative,  

the  lack  of  resolution  in  Kimi  no  na  wa’s  narrative  seems  to  gesture  towards  a  less  

political  mode  of  using  magic  realism  as  a  means  of  pursuing  “the  quest  for  

identity…[and]  is  not  the  least  bit  involved  with  the  assertion  of  identity”  (Strecher  

269).  While  this  quote  is  aimed  towards  the  work  of  contemporary  Japanese  author,  

Murakami  Haruki,  it  is  also  remarkably  relevant  to  Kimi  no  na  wa.  Though  I  have  

previously  separated  the  local  and  the  global  into  a  binary,  like  all  thematic  

bifurcations  that  the  film  explores,  the  boundary  between  the  two  motifs  is  porous.  

Shinkai  does  not  seem  to  be  taking  a  distinct  political  stance  between  the  values  of  

Western  modernity  or  Japanese  traditions,  but  instead,  seeks  to  explore  how  both  

cultural  paradigms  reflect  on  the  emerging  identities  of  both  characters  as  they  

interact  with  another.  While  there  can  be  conflict  and  tension  among  these  

dichotomous  concepts,  as  is  the  case  for  most  iyashikei  productions,  the  conflict  is  

usually  heavily  internalized  and  the  emergence  of  occult  phenomenon  exists  to  

draw  those  tensions  outward.  For  example,  the  strain  of  magic  realism  found  in  Kimi  

no  na  wa,  is  primarily  focused  on  how  it  can  be  used  to  construct  the  self  in  relation  

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to  the  other  and  how  to  mediate  the  porous  binary  of  modernity  and  tradition.  In  

addition,  for  Taki  and  Mitsuha,  there  are  also  more  basic  separations  of  

man/woman,  urban/rural,  and  the  tenuous  past/future,  which  continue  to  become  

more  and  more  dubious  as  they  exist  within  one  another.  The  fundamental  

instability  of  meaning  as  is  symbolized  throughout  the  film  by  woven  cords,  festivals  

of  tenuous  purpose,  and  shrine  practices  are  also  what  mediates  the  supernatural  

forces  within  the  narrative.  It  is  no  coincidence  that  it  is  these  myth-­‐laden  

paraphernalia  and  activities  which  continues  to  break  down  the  boundaries  of  the  

binaries  stated  above,  and  show  the  reality  of  identity  formation,  both  in  the  

historical  sense  as  well  as  the  cultural,  as  something  that  is  constantly  fluid  and  

rewritable.    

  While  Shinkai  shows  how  the  narrative  of  historical  memory  and  identity  is  

formed  and  rewritten,  effectively  undermining  the  essential  verisimilitude  of  the  

current  present,  he  makes  a  strong  case  for  the  preservation  of  cultural  memory  

through  perpetual  re-­‐creation.  At  once,  fatalistic  and  optimistic,  these  tensions  drive  

both  iterations  of  restrictive  and  restorative  nostalgia  throughout  the  narrative,  and  

in  a  meta-­‐commentary  about  the  effectiveness  of  “doing”  or  “creating”  tradition  

through  materiality,  Shinkai  shows  how  one  can  continue  to  engage  with  the  fluidity  

of  tradition  and  memory  in  a  concrete  manner.    

  Kimi  no  na  wa  was  hugely  successful  in  the  box  office,  rising  above  nearly  all  

of  Hayao  Miyazaki’s  works  in  terms  of  highest  grossing  films.  Its  remarkable  

performance  in  the  box  office  gestures  towards  the  sustained  relevance  of  Shinkai’s  

thematic  exploration  of  memory  and  cultural  identity.  As  implied  in  the  first  

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chapter,  anime  continues  to  be  a  powerful  medium  in  which  to  explore  Japanese  

cultural  identity,  and  far  from  being  odorless  medium  that  Iwabuchi  claims.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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CHAPTER  4:  CONCLUSION  

  In  Kimi  no  Na  Wa,  we  see  the  potentiality  for  multiple  interpretations  of  the  

role  of  historicity,  and  the  malleability  of  the  ever-­‐extending  and  multilayered  

present.  The  foundations  of  what  passes  for  reality  are  in  constant  flux,  and  time  

ravels  and  unravels  in  a  manner  that  redefines    the  causal  understanding  of  history,  

which  in  turn  challenges  the  dichotomy  between  modernity  and  tradition.  In  The  

Gutenberg  Galaxy:  The  Making  of  Typographic  Man,  Marshall  McLuhan,  borrowing  

from  George  Poulet’s  Studies  in  Human  Time,  explores  this  sense  of  nonlinear  time  

in  relation  to  how  one  perceives  the  self  and  one’s  contextual  identity.  He  states,    

 “The  self  is  obliged,  such  is  the  discoutinuity  of  these  typographic  moments,   ‘each  time  to  forget  itself   in  order  to  re-­‐invent  itself,  to  reinvent  itself  in  order  to  regain  interest  in  itself,  in  short,  to  effect  a  mocking   simulacrum   of   continued   creation,   thanks   to  which   it  believes   it   will   escape   the   authentication   of   its   nothingness,   and  out   of   its   nothingness,   refashion   a   reality’”   (Poulet   87,   qtd   in  McLuhan  249).  

 

 The  “nothingness”  that  both  Poulet  and  McLuhan  gesture  towards  seems  

particularly  apt  to  describe  the  absence  of  an  unchanging  cultural  essence.  Instead,  

communities  constantly  reinvent  and  recreate  new  definitions  of  tradition  and  of  

modernity,  in  a  manner  that  destroys  the  dichotomous  relationship  that  one  would  

believe  this  binary  to  maintain.  Within  Kimi  No  Na  Wa,  time  is  nonlinear.  The  

present  collapses  into  the  past  and  into  the  future  simultaneously,  and  Taki’s  

pilgrimage  both  through  Shinkai’s  imaginary  landscapes,  as  well  as  through  the  

contours  of  Mitsuha’s  life,  illustrates  the  multilayered  quality  of  time  poignantly.  

Mitsuha’s  grandmother’s  ideas  also  parallel  the  “mocking  simulacrum  of  continued  

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creation”  that  Poulet  describes,  when  she  reiterates  the  significance  of  passing  

dreams  and  the  need  to  constantly  practice  the  motions  of  tradition,  regardless  of  

shifting  values  and  meanings  behind  those  actions14.  She  recognizes  that  in  the  

creating  and  doing  of  tradition,  new  significances  underlying  practice  based  on  

present  contextual  particulars  will  emerge.  We  see  this  happen  when  the  traditional  

practice  of  braiding  cords  becomes  the  means  by  which  Taki  and  Mitsuha  are  able  to  

save  the  citizens  of  Itomori.  Anime,  as  a  medium  that  embraces  its  artifice  and  its  

simulacra-­‐driven  art  form,  in  conjunction  with  the  medium’s  convincing  ability  to  

skip  and  rewind  temporality  in  a  manner  that  rejects  linearity,  is  an  ideal  mode  to  

experiment  with  historical  time  in  relation  to  identity  formation.  The  fluidity  and  

abstractions  of  artistic  styles  that  Shinkai  experiments  with  makes  this  work  a  

critical  study  of  how  symbols  of  Japanese  identity  can  be  a  mode  of  self-­‐

orientalization,  but  a  simultaneous  space  for  reinvention.    

4.1  Revisiting  the  Global:  Anime  and  its  International  Popularity    

  For  Japanese  culture  scholars  such  as  Koichi  Iwabuchi  and  Otsuka  Eiji,  the  

global  popularity  of  anime  stems  from  “the  ‘odorless’  nature  of  animation….  and  that  

if  it  is  indeed  the  case  that  the  Japaneseness  of  Japanese  animation  derives,  

consciously  or  unconsciously,  from  its  erasure  of  physical  signs  of  Japaneseness”  

(Iwabuchi  33),  then  the  Japan  that  is  shown  on  the  screen  across  the  world  is  a  

“raceless  and  cultureless”  one  (Iwabuchi  33).  As  the  present  analysis  has  suggested,                                                                                                                  14  As  quoted  before,  the  grandmother  states,  “Two  hundred  years  ago,  scandal  maker  Mayugoro’s  bathroom  caught  on  fire  and  burned  down  this  whole  area.  The  shrine  and  old  documents  were  destroyed  and  this  is  known  as  The  Great  Fire  of  Mayugoro.  So  the  meaning  of  our  festivals  became  unknown  and  only  the  form  lived  on.  But  even  if  words  are  lost,  tradition  should  be  handed  down  and  that  is  the  important  task  we  at  Miyamizu  Shrine  have.”  

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however,  I  don’t  believe  that  this  not  is  the  case.  Of  course,  anime’s  global  popularity  

may  stem  in  part  because  of  the  focus  on  the  universal  themes  that  it  explores,  such  

as  self-­‐discovery  and  development.  I  believe  however,  that  anime’s  global  popularity  

has  more  to  do  with  its  willingness  and  remarkable  ability  to  depict  subtly  the  

effects  of  pain,  trauma,  and  existential  melancholy  in  a  manner  that  brings  out  the  

central  issues  of  identity-­‐related  instability  in  the  postmodern  age.  Perhaps  the  

manner  in  which  Japanese  culture  tends  to  prioritize  the  blending  and  harmonizing  

of  disparate  themes  and  ideas,  instead  of  trying  to  raise  boundaries  between  them  is  

a  powerful  approach  to  storytelling  that  is  particularly  relevant  in  a  globalized  age.    

Trauma  may  differ,  depending  on  the  personal  and  national  tragedies  

inflicted  on  an  individual  and  nation,  but  this  observation  also  begs  the  question  

whether  the  particular  nuances  of  pain  can  be  adequately  expressed.  In  her  Body  in  

Pain,  Elaine  Scarry  explains  that  “pain,  more  than  any  other  phenomenon,  resists  the  

objectification  in  language”  (Scarry  5).  Pain  can  only  be  expressed  with  abstractions  

and  allegories,  and  is  ultimately  unshareable,  because  pain  and  suffering  actively  

resists  expression  through  language.  Therefore,  it  may  be  the  case  that  in  the  face  of  

global  trauma  and  pain,  nuance  and  expression  of  such  concepts  through  language  

become  null  and  void.  Pain,  and  more  specifically  apocalyptic  and  identity-­‐voiding  

pain,  simply  exists  as  global  white  noise,  regardless  of  physical  and  ideological  

boundaries,  and  is  a  fundamental  building  block  for  a  globalized  culture.  In  regards  

to  new,  global-­‐spanning  media,  animation  has  become  a  potent  medium  in  

representing  abstractions  and  spectacle,  which  makes  it  all  the  more  convincing  in  

expressing  ideas  that  refuse  to  be  put  into  words.  Combined  with  the  willingness  to  

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explore  a  provocative  array  of  thematic  elements,  and  widely-­‐appealing  visual  and  

cinematic  styles,  it  may  be  the  ability  to  portray  human  suffering  and  emotion  

earnestly  that  has  allowed  anime  to  spread  globally.  In  this  sense,  it  is  not  so  much  

that  creators  purposely  gravitate  towards  only  global  themes  or  a  universal  

depiction  of  pain  or  trauma  that  is  not  specific  to  to  the  Japanese  experience,  but  

that  the  nature  of  pain  and  trauma,  and  the  inherent  difficulty  to  express  it  

explicitly,  leaves  only  the  potential  for  abstractions.  But  within  the  spaces  of  

abstraction,  there  remains  a  potential  for  genuine  empathy  for  the  figures  on  screen,  

regardless  of  the  foreign  cultural  particularities  that  are  being  expressed.    

4.2  “Odorful”  Mediums    

  While  it  has  been  my  primary  objective  to  explore  whether  anime  is  indeed  a  

medium  of  mukokuseki  or  suspended  statelessness,  I  would  also  like  to  ask  a  

consequent  question:  if  anime  and  video  games  remain  “odorless,”  what  constitutes  

an  “odorful”  medium?  What  artistic  form  or  tradition  retains  such  a  heavy  and  pure  

sense  of  true  “Japaneseness”  that  it  exudes  the  kind  of  cultural  odor  that  is  “closely  

associated  with  racial  and  bodily  images  of  a  country  of  origin”  (Iwabuchi  28).  In  his  

Recentering  Globalization:  Popular  Culture  and  Japanese  Transnationalism,  Iwabuchi  

briefly  goes  into  Japanese  dramas  and  pop  music  as  other  modes  of  soft  power,  

because  they  may  have  more  of  an  “odor”  by  nature  of  having  Japanese  individuals  

on  screen  (Iwabuchi  34).  However,  this  analysis  also  seems  to  argue  that  the  

influence  of  the  West  is  deeply  embedded  in  those  forms  as  well.    

Even  if  we  remove  ourselves  from  the  popular  cultures  of  the  present  and  

consider  more  traditional  artistic  forms  and  entertainment,  is  that  where  “odorful”  

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mediums  are  found,  or  do  they  also  become  culturally  discounted  by  outside  

cultures  that  may  directly  or  indirectly  influence  Japan?  Perhaps  in  the  past,  it  was  

not  America,  but  China,  as  the  wakon-­‐yosai  (Japanese  spirit,  Western  techniques)  

ideology  stemmed  from  the  earlier  wakon-­‐kansai  (Japanese  spirit,  Chinese  

technology)  (Sato  2007).  In  this  sense,  perhaps  the  traditional  arts  and  scholarship  

of  the  past,  which  is  often  heavily  inspired  by  Chinese  culture,  also  robs  of  

“Japaneseness”  to  some  extent.  

In  short,  while  posing  the  question  of  whether  the  cultural  arts  can  be  truly  

representative  of  Japanese  culture  is  an  important  and  valid  one  to  make,  the  

existence  of  other  global  influences  may  not  necessarily  discount  the  “Japaneseness”  

of  the  works.  As  I  have  suggested,  the  medium  and  the  narratives  that  come  from  

these  authors  and  artists  cannot  be  divorced  from  the  cultural  context  and  times  

which  influence  them.  Rather  than  being  “stateless,”  perhaps  these  works  find  a  

“statefulness,”  -­‐-­‐  if  not  at  the  center  of  the  narrative,  then  at  the  peripheries.  Looking  

at  earlier  works  of  anime,  such  as  Tetsuwan  Atom  and  Sazae-­‐san,  and  how  these  

foundational  works  inspired  some  of  the  most  well-­‐known  and  characteristic  genres  

of  anime  today,  I  believe  that  questions  of  Japanese  identity,  history  and  

representation  still  remain  at  the  center  of  many  anime  narratives  today.  In  this  

sense,  perhaps  anime  has  the  potential  to  be  more  “odorful”  than  its  exteriority  

presents.    

 

 

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